The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

My favorite day of the week
Download music like a maniac
The future of music is online, but the future of online music is cloudy. Now that a widely usable format for online music has come along -- MP3 -- issues of quality and availability are no longer problems. Instead, as Napster's woes and the recent lawsuit against MP3.com illustrate, the problems now revolve around copyright infringement. Even the fairly innocuous ohhla.com, which offers no music but simply transcriptions of rap lyrics, was threatened with a cease-and-desist order by music giant BMI. So what does all this litigation mean for you? It means that while the Web sites and record labels and music publishing companies hash out the legalities, you should download like a maniac! There are some big sites with vast music libraries from which you can download.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/co...809154,00.html

DOJ to Supreme Court: Drop MS appeal
The U.S. Justice Department urged the Supreme Court on Friday not to reconsider an appeals court ruling that the company violated U.S. antitrust laws. The department told the high court in a legal brief that there was no reason to review the case, and it disputed Microsoft's argument that a lower court ruling against the company should be disqualified because of misconduct by a lower court judge. Microsoft's argument for Supreme Court review "rests squarely on a mischaracterization of the court of appeals' ruling," the Justice Department said. The department also said that, since Microsoft may later appeal other portions of the case, "granting (a review) now would likely lead to multiple, piecemeal requests for review... "
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Cold War II? Russia warns tech experts
Russia warned its computer experts on Friday of the dangers of visiting the United States after a Russian software designer was arrested there for violating a controversial new law. Last July, Dmitry Sklyarov became the first person to be arrested on charges of selling technology designed to circumvent a 1998 U.S. copyright protection law. Formally arraigned on Thursday, he faces up to 25 years in jail if convicted. "We want to point out to all Russian specialists cooperating with U.S. firms in computer programming and software design that, whatever the outcome of Sklyarov's case, they may fall under the jurisdiction of the 1998 Act on the territory of the United States," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Sun to break the mold on StarOffice
Sun Microsystems is showing Linux fans the next version of StarOffice, the most viable competition to Microsoft's Office package, and will release the beta version in October. Sun acquired StarOffice from Hamburg, Germany-based Star Division in 1999, and has made it available as a free download in an effort to undermine popular programs such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint that help to keep the Windows operating system dominant. The company also released the source code for the software under the General Public License (GPL), the same license that allows anyone to see, modify and distribute Linux software. Version 6.0 will break these programs into individual applications that can run independently, said software demonstrators at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo where the software has been demonstrated this week.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Copywrong?
For computer geeks and civil libertarians, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is one of the most despised laws of the land. But the 3-year-old law passed a major test on Wednesday: To the dismay of critics, the U.S. Copyright Office evaluated the effects of the DMCA without calling for a complete revision. Specifically, the 200-page study judged whether the new Net-focused law violated two relevant sections of offline copyright law: the doctrine of "first sale," or the right to resell or make personal copies of a copyrighted work without a publisher's permission; as well as a copyright law that permits the owner of a computer program to make a backup copy. The study does give critics some ammunition to work with.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/0...ort/index.html

South Korea keeps eye on sex offenders
South Korea carried out a controversial plan Thursday to post the names of convicted sex offenders on a government Web site, sparking hot debates and a Web traffic jam in the world's most wired nation. The Commission on Youth Protection posted the names, birth dates, occupations and hometowns of 169 people convicted of crimes including rape and pedophilia -- a move that had activists cheering and legal experts crying foul. The controversy mirrors reactions from civil liberties groups in the United States when Web sites began disclosing the identity of sex convicts, as well as the nature of their crimes. The trend took off in the late 1990s after states began enacting "Megan's law," named after a New Jersey girl who was sexually assaulted and killed by a repeat sex offender living in her neighborhood. The law requires that such criminals register with local police departments, allowing people to access a list of offenders in their area.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

She Makes Genes Cool for School
Watch out, university students: If you're not careful, Molly Fitzgerald-Hayes will teach you about the human genome when you're not paying attention. Fitzgerald-Hayes, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Massachusetts is testing out a class called "You and Your Genome" on a group of students this fall. She is working with the university to make a similar class available this spring to undergraduate non-science majors as part of their general education requirement. "The idea is to try to make it as friendly and non-threatening as possible, and get people sort of hooked on the idea that DNA is really cool and it's not scary," she said. "Then when they're not looking you slip some molecules in."
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,45801,00.html

Heart Patient Achieves Milestone
When Robert Tools became the world's first recipient of a self-contained artificial heart, the company that makes the device set a 60-day survival goal and cautioned that the patient might not make it that far. Tools reached that mark Thursday and has given his medical team at Jewish Hospital no reason to believe that he won't continue to improve. The team shared their stories about the former telephone company worker this week, describing him as a gregarious patient who wants to help others with terminal heart failure. His nurses say Tools does his exercises and eats properly, but sometimes isn't thrilled to see them. They say he is well-informed and aware of his surroundings. He likes to gently joke and tease.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,46470,00.html

Cracker Tries Law's Right Side
Dennis Moran, an 18-year-old high school dropout, earned international notoriety and a nine-month jail sentence last year for his computer-hacking exploits. He was accused by the FBI of hacking into a computer security firm's website and the computer systems of four U.S. military bases. He also hacked into an anti-drug site connected to the Los Angeles Police Department, adding a cartoon of Donald Duck with a hypodermic needle in his arm. Now Moran, who went by the online-name Coolio, runs a computer services company that a mentor helped him set up while in jail. He is chauffeured to jobs on work-release during the day and returned to jail each night. He completes his sentence on Tuesday.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46472,00.html

Did This Musician 'Cell' Out?
Imagine attending a symphony in which everyone's cell phone -– 200 phones, to be exact –- rings at once. Sounds dreadful, right? To American composer Golan Levin, the ringing cell phone is music to his ears, and he's dedicating an entire concert to the mobile phone. Levin, currently an artist-in-residence at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, is actually composing music in which all 200 instruments are the audience's ringing cell phones. Even if his "Dialtones Telesymphony" doesn't alter most classical musicians' view that cell phones should be shut off before a concert, Levin, 29, from New York City, is confident the concert will resonate well with the audience and eliminate some public pessimism surrounding the mobile phone.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46273,00.html

Security danger found in web postings
A new way to highjack internet sites to attack individual web users, with just a single line of code, has been discovered by a US researcher. The trick uses Cross Site Scripting (CSS), a technique identified by security experts in 1997. This exploits the ability of internet sites and web applications to contain embedded scripts and links to other web pages in order to execute dangerous code. The new trick was discovered by Jeremiah Grossman, a consultant for US company Whitehat Security. He found that just one line of code was enough to fool many web sites into running rogue code. Among these sites was Microsoft's popular web email service Hotmail, as well as other undisclosed commercial web sites.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991221

Astronaut warns of Earth impact
The commander of the International Space Station (ISS) has expressed his concern to the BBC at the impact mankind is having on the Earth's environment. Commander Frank Culbertson - who has just begun a four-month tour on the ISS - told the Radio 4 Today programme he and fellow astronauts had witnessed signs of climatic change. "We see storms, we see droughts, we saw a dust storm a couple of days ago, in Turkey I think it was, and we have seen hurricanes," he said. "At night you see cities well lit up in populated parts of the world."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1518232.stm

Millionaires take aim at Mars
Several dot-com millionaires have formed a foundation to bankroll space shots aimed at putting humans on Mars, a founding member tells MSNBC.com. Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk says the first mission should get off the ground as early as 2003. That mission could involve putting mice in Earth orbit to test an artificial-gravity system. The experiment in artificial gravity is also being pursued by the Mars Society, a nonprofit advocacy group that has received contributions from Musk for other projects in the past. The society’s steering committee gave its go-ahead for the mission last weekend, Mars Society President Robert Zubrin told MSNBC.com on Wednesday.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/621237.asp

Ultrafast wireless technology set to lift off
Later this year, the Federal Communications Commission will decide whether to give the green light to so-called ultra-wideband transmission. If approved, UWB could have a dramatic impact on short-range wireless communications for the enterprise. UWB is almost two decades old, but is used mainly in limited radar or position-location devices. Only recently has UWB been applied to business communications. It's a different type of transmission that will lead, proponents say, to low-power, high-bandwidth and relatively simple radios for local- and personal-area network interface cards and access points. At higher power levels in the future, UWB systems could span several miles or more.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/0...idg/index.html

Law enforcers report spike in cybercrime
Cybercrime cases are rising in high-tech regions, say U.S. law-enforcement officials. Prosecutors and investigators are seeing more cases related to computer hacking, theft of trade secrets and hardware, and other tech crimes. In Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara District Attorney's Office is tackling almost 30 tech-related cases this year — twice as many as last year, investigator John McMullen says. In Boston, federal prosecutor John Grossman's high-tech unit is juggling 10 cybercrime cases — "a marked increase" from last year. In Austin, Texas, incidents of tech crime have "skyrocketed," says Detective Paul Brick of the Austin Police Department. Its cases are up 30%, to 84, for the first 8 months of this year from last year.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/t...crime-wave.htm

Argentina ISP Shoots for Stars
When the news that an American multimillionaire was going to travel to outer space made headlines, many Argentineans overwhelmingly said they wished they could go on such an adventure. On Friday, one Argentinean will be selected to go on such a journey as the prize in a contest sponsored by Sion, an ISP based in Buenos Aires. The "Sion takes you to the stratosphere" contest is also an example of the bold measures that Internet companies are taking here despite a crumbling economy. To have a chance of winning the draw, participants have to subscribe to the service or ask for a free 24-hour demo. The winner -- who has to be an inhabitant of Buenos Aires or the greater Buenos Aires area, as those are the only areas covered by the company -- will fly to Russia to board a Mig-25 that will take this lucky individual 25,000 meters above sea level.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46450,00.html

Regulating Minors' Access to the Internet Can Backfire
Headed for the Supreme Court in March 2002, ACLU lawyer Ann Beeson and her colleagues will argue the unconstitutionality of the Child Internet Protection Act (CHIPA), a law passed by Congress last year stipulating that libraries and schools will lose their federal funds if they don't install blocking software like NetNanny or CyberPatrol. While blocking programs are supposed to serve as filters against child pornography and content that might be harmful to minors, in reality this software tends to block sites in a way ACLU representative Emily Whitfield describes as "capricious."
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/bios/

GM's Ultrahybrid Vehicles
When General Motors' electric buses hit New York City's streets for a test run a couple of years ago, the company found that the new hybrid vehicles—propelled by a diesel generator and electric motors—burned less than half the fuel of a conventional diesel and created 90 percent less pollution. One hitch: the roughly 5,000 dollars' worth of batteries that mediated the flow of electricity between the generator and motor burned out after only a year. Now, GM plans to keep its hybrid buses rolling by replacing the batteries with a high-tech cousin of the capacitors that regulate power in electronic devices. The same technology may soon help make hybrid cars more efficient and affordable.
http://www.techreview.com/magazine/s...nnovation4.asp

More news later on

[walktalker]

Top Hacking Tools Site Restricts Access
Citing a desire to thwart "script kiddies" and security companies, a popular site that provides free hacking tools has closed its doors to the general public. Hack.co.za will no longer allow all visitors to download its collection of exploits, according to its operator, a South African who uses the nickname Gov-Boi. "I am annoyed with security companies using my archives for their own personal profits ... I am tired of so-called 'penetration testers' who barely know how to use nmap using my (free, non-profit) archive to increase their profits. i am tired of catering for Web page-defacers," wrote Gov-Boi, in a posting at the site today. In an e-mail interview with Newsbytes, Gov-Boi declined to name which security companies have relied on his archives.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169648.html

Germans Seek To Centralize Internet Content Control
An agreement between the German federal and state governments concerning the reform of electronic media regulatory supervision could result in tougher controls on Internet content. German federal and state governments agreed in principle on a reform plan under which the states would hand over technical and regulatory authority - known in Germany as "data protection authority" - for all electronic media to the federal government. Currently, the federal government oversees technical and regulatory authority of telecommunications, while the states are responsible for electronic media, such as television and radio broadcasting and the Internet. In return for giving up regulatory control of electronic media, German states - which enjoy a high level of autonomy from the federal government - would gain the right to create and oversee a central authority to supervise programming and content.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169637.html

Code Red: Born In The USA?
While China may have been hit early and hard with the Code Red worm, security experts today said there is no clear evidence that the worm began there, or that its author is Chinese. In a presentation before a House subcommittee Wednesday, Keith Rhodes, chief technologist for the Center for Technology and Engineering at the Government Accounting Office (GAO), said that Code Red I is "believed to have started at a university in Guangdong, China." Rhodes, whose testimony was published at the GAO Web site, was not immediately available for comment. But according to intrusion logs compiled by Dshield.org, Code Red hit the United States and other countries before it made its way to a server installed at Foshan University in Guangdong.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169636.html

Consumers Think Interactive TV Is Too Much Work
A new study reports consumers have little interest in many features of interactive television, except those that offer more control over TV viewing. Interactive television, or iTV, has many different aspects. Its products and services include Internet access, interactive programming services, shopping, gambling, e-mail, chat and instant messaging. According to the study by media research company Statistical Research Inc. (SRI), 72 percent of respondents said they were not interested in interacting with television programs. Even in homes that have iTV capabilities, respondents said they rarely or never use interactive links in TV shows, TV-based Internet or e-mail.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169634.html

No free speech for animal rights Web sites
On Thursday, EnviroLink Network, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Internet service provider, took offline two Web sites belonging to the animal-rights activist group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. The action came in response to a letter sent to the ISP earlier in the week by Huntingdon Life Sciences, a British medical research firm. Citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Huntingdon accused the activists of violating its copyright. Although no charges have yet been filed, under the terms of the DMCA, Envirolink was forced to remove the sites to avoid potential legal liability. "It's very clear that Huntingdon Life Sciences just wants to shut them up," says Josh Knauer, the founder of Envirolink, which provides free Web hosting to nonprofits. The animal-rights group's U.S. site has been replaced with a single page explaining the conflict, while the main site redirects to another ISP, allowing it to remain up for the moment.
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2001/0...als/index.html

Cutting Edge Technology to Send Sound Where it Belongs
It's nice to think of the world as a symphony, but most of the time it's cacophony — clashing noises coming from all around us. "When you listen to sound over loudspeakers," says F. Joseph Pompei at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "you don't have any control over where the sound goes. Sometimes you don't want it to go everywhere." Pompei has devised a way to solve that problem. He has figured out how to "steer" sounds by aiming them only where he wants them to go with a device he calls an "Audio Spotlight."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...dge010831.html

The truth about the DivX revolution
When we poo-pooed the announcement by Hollywood's big studios a fortnight ago that they were launching a video-on-demand system to deliver movies over the Internet, we had a number of emails arguing that we'd got it all wrong and were behind the times. DivX is already here, it's already being used and, most importantly, it's great quality at full screen, we were told. It is the equivalent of MP3 for videos and the world will never be the same. Hollywood studios are right to be worried and they may already be too late. We've checked out DivX before and were unconvinced that it possessed the full powers ascribed to it by its supporters. But what's the harm of another look?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21407.html

OK, I'm done

[walktalker]

Bump to the left, bump to the right

[Ramona_A_Stone]

Here's one of the millions of thanks and bumps you're owed walkietalkie. Thou art, verily, most formidable among the Host of the Napsterites.

[TankGirl]

Hey Mr. Newsman, don't archive these yet, I am just starting to read them!

A for your great service!

- tg

[walktalker]

Originally posted by TankGirl
Hey Mr. Newsman, don't archive these yet, I am just starting to read them!

Whoops, you caught me in action
I'll let this issue on the surface a little longer... enjoy the reading !