The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

AMD: I want my MTV PC
MTV is building what it considers the perfect PC for 18- to 24-year-olds: a machine that has a built-in TV and radio tuner, DVD player and CD burner. The MTV-branded PCs will use processors from Advanced Micro Devices and be built by LAN Plus, the companies announced Wednesday. The first MTV PC, expected to be available in the spring, will feature AMD's Athlon XP processor, a flat-panel display, DVD and CD-rewritable drives, and cable TV and radio tuners. It will cost about $1,800, roughly the same as a high-end AMD-based PC from a manufacturer such as Compaq Computer.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp01

AIM security tool opens back doors
A tool recommended by a security group to squash the bugs in America Online's Instant Messenger application actually had secret backdoor code that allowed the author to, among other things, redirect browsers to porn sites. The security group w00w00, which discovered last week's serious flaw in AOL's instant messenger software, said Tuesday that a program that could act as a temporary Band-Aid for the AIM problem had in reality been misrepresented by the person who posted it to the Bugtraq mailing list late last month.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

HP lowers cost of PCs with DVD+RW
Hewlett-Packard is lowering the price of PCs with DVD recording drives. The company's spring lineup of PCs will include a $1,599 Pavilion desktop with HP's dvd100i DVD+RW drive. The previous Pavilion fitted with the drive was priced at about $2,000. As a standalone product, the DVD+RW drive costs $599. In addition to the drive, HP's 780n desktop features a 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, a 120GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM and a high-end graphics card.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

SuSE settles trademark suit
German Linux company SuSE settled a trademark suit on Wednesday over the name "Krayon," allowing it to resume shipments of its boxed products in Germany, the company said in a statement. On Tuesday, a regional court in Munich issued a preliminary injunction halting shipments of SuSE Linux 7.3 in Germany on behalf of Crayon Vertriebs. Attorney Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth had contended that the name of an open-source program called "Krayon," which appeared in SuSE Linux, infringed on Crayon Vertriebs' own trademark, "Crayon."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Vote rigging sheds light on Web services
Microsoft's .Net Web services technology appeared to experience a sudden boost in popularity over its rival Java, according to a poll run by ZDNet UK. By December 21, more than two-thirds of the poll's respondents (69.5 percent) said they planned to deliver some applications through Web services by the end of 2002, with a large majority of those (nearly half the total sample) planning to use Java. Only 21.5 percent said they planned to use Microsoft .Net -- even less than the figure (23.5 percent) planning to use neither.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

IRS discovers missing computers
The tables have turned on Mr. Taxman. The Internal Revenue Service has been working to account for more than 2,300 computers discovered missing in a recent audit of its systems by the Treasury Department, the IRS confirmed Wednesday. The agency, known for its needle-nose style of tax collecting, itself misplaced thousands of PCs, laptops and server equipment. IRS officials said that since the audit, the agency has located about 1,600 of the missing computer systems. It added that the computers had security software installed that would protect any sensitive data.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Virus writers take an early crack at .Net
Virus writers have apparently made the early developer list for Microsoft.Net. On Wednesday, antivirus companies received a copy of the first virus capable of infecting files based on Microsoft's .Net Intermediate Language, or MSIL. Known as W32.Donut, the virus does little but infect other .Net files, but it shows that the programmers who create such code are looking ahead, said Motoaki Yamamura, a virus researcher with security software company Symantec.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Microsoft moves to close depositions
Microsoft filed a motion that, if successful, would bar the public from access to any future depositions in its antitrust case, but The New York Times and other media organizations will likely oppose it. The Redmond, Wash.-based software behemoth filed a motion Wednesday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to vacate a standing order in an ongoing antitrust case maintained by 10 states and the District of Columbia. The case grew out of a case originally brought by the Department of Justice.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Feds nix pact on Net radio stations
Federal copyright authorities have blocked a deal between the record industry and broadcasters that would have set royalty terms for radio-station broadcasts put online. Broadcasters, such as radio giant Clear Channel, had agreed with the Recording Industry Association of America in late December to pay for music used online. Terms of the settlement had been kept secret, however. The Copyright Office released its decision rejecting the deal Wednesday, potentially sending the two sides back to the drawing board.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Going mano a mano with Microsoft
Ken Belanger's Pocket PC may be a gag, but his lawsuit against Microsoft is not. On Tuesday, the entrepreneur sued Microsoft in small claims court in San Francisco, claiming he created a Pocket PC 17 years ago, and therefore has rights to the name the company has given its handheld computer. Belanger's product is not a computer at all but a decidedly low-tech joke gift poking fun at tech industry hype. People who shell out $9.95 for the device receive a box slightly bigger than a deck of cards that contains a poker chip and a set of instructions telling them how to use the chip to make important business and other decisions by flipping it like a coin.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

A "Speed Bump" vs. Music Copying
Edward W. Felten doesn't look like the type to court controversy -- or to be at the center of it. But the soft-spoken Princeton University computer-science professor unwittingly became a key figure in the discussion about the future of the digital-music industry. In 1999, the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a music-industry consortium, held a contest to see if computer hackers could successfully break four digital-music copy-protection schemes, called watermarks. Felten, a celebrated cryptographer, and several students took up the challenge and soon they had cracked all four watermarks.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/...02019_7170.htm

A satellite radio field of dreams
If you build it, will they buy? That's the question the nascent satellite radio industry faces, as the two companies that comprise the fledgling market try to attract customers after spending more than $1 billion each to launch complex satellite broadcast networks. Both XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio are making major pushes at the Consumer Electronics Show here, hoping to convince retailers, car-stereo manufacturers and the world at large that millions of Americans are willing to pay for a superior alternative to broadcast radio.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=cd_pr

States propose digitized ID cards
State and federal authorities are working to develop new identity cards that could be easily checked nationwide and contain digitized fingerprints or other features that would be difficult to forge. A group of state drivers-license agencies plans to unveil on Monday a set of standards that would enable authorities to instantly check identities and possibly criminal backgrounds across state lines. Meanwhile, Congress has directed the Department of Transportation to develop a set of standards on its own.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[greedy_lars]

I this unreplied thread for the first time out of many chances

[walktalker]

Online CD Sales May Suffer Static
James Hannon walked away from the record store with nine CDs, including the newest album from Groove Armada. He rushed home and loaded the CD into his Pioneer Pro DJ CD player, a high-end mixing board and sound system. Strange static came out of his system where he thought music would be. Turned out copy protection wasn't the culprit. He'd probably just gotten hold of a bad CD, perhaps caused by defective packaging. But the fact that Hannon was even thinking about copy protection illustrates a problem the record companies will probably have to deal with.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,49539,00.html

Feds Accelerate Fuel-Cell Cars
After nearly $1.5 billion in subsidies, the Bush administration is ending an eight-year program to help automakers develop high-mileage, family-size cars. Instead, it wants to spur the growth of hydrogen fuel cells to power the next generation of motor vehicles. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, addressing an auto show in Detroit, planned Wednesday to tout hydrogen fuel-cell development as part of a broader strategy to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil and help the environment by reducing carbon dioxide emissions and other tailpipe pollution.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,49589,00.html

Lot to Learn About School Laptops
While Maine educators look forward to the day when students and teachers will integrate one-to-one computing into their courses, they are realistic about the patience, time and training that this ambitious project will take. No one knows that better than technology coordinator Crystal Priest. All eighth graders in her district have been working with laptops for over a year.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,49576,00.html

ImClone Problems Multiply
The J.P. Morgan H&Q Healthcare conference was buzzing Wednesday, but instead of new treatments, attendees were chatting about the clinical trials and tribulations of pharmaceutical company ImClone Systems. The company has been causing a hubbub since the start of the conference on Monday, when a story published in The Cancer Letter sent a ripple of surprise through the 5,000 attendees. The newsletter reported that the company's cancer drug was facing worse obstacles from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration than previously believed.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,49609,00.html

3-D Models Give Proteins Shape
Researchers trying to discover drugs have more data than they can sift through, so many are using computer modeling to deal with the data. But not everyone trusts computer models enough to bet their businesses on them. Since the human genome was decoded, the amount of gene and protein information has skyrocketed. Whenever researchers are confronted with loads of data, computing power is an obvious solution. But most believe that although computers can speed research, they can't take the place of the laboratory bench.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,49555,00.html

Hepatitis C Research Gets a Boost
When researchers at Vertex Pharmaceuticals chose hepatitis C as the disease they hoped to treat, they didn't realize the uphill battle they faced. But thanks to new drug discovery technologies, they've come up with a drug that, if successful, will work much like many of the drugs effective against HIV. Drug discovery is not easy. It often takes about 10 years and $5 million to $10 million to bring a drug to market. But there are some things that can make it harder than normal, such as a disease molecule that just doesn't want to stick to a drug.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,49584,00.html

Quantum Leap: Seize the Light
These days, quantum computers are scrawny little gadgets whose greatest accomplishment so far is factoring the number 15. However, their power grows exponentially with size, so whenever quantum computers grow a little bigger, researchers get more than a little excited. Two papers this month, in fact, present new frameworks for quantum information storage and large-scale quantum computation -- involving hundreds of thousands of potential quantum bits (qubits). Both tasks are essential to making a quantum computer, and both entail challenges for the engineer as well as the theorist.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,49448,00.html

Hint of Earliest Stars: Greatest Fireworks Ever Still Beyond View
The grandest fireworks display in the history of the universe played out in reverse is how researchers are describing data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope that shows that most stars were formed in a brief period early in the Universe's history that was followed by a relative drought of activity that continues today. Using images of the deep and distant universe provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers found that a "torrential firestorm" of star birth "abruptly lit up the pitch-dark heavens just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang," researchers said today at a press conference at NASA headquarters.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...hs_020108.html

Earth granted reprieve
The Earth has been granted a reprieve. Astronomers believe the planet may now escape being swallowed up when the Sun dies in about 7.5 billion years' time. The new calculations actually extend the length of time the Earth will be habitable by 200 million years. But, in the end, the surface of the planet will simply become too hot for life to survive. Earth-dwellers will have to find alternative homes in space, say astrophysicists in the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1749389.stm

Data "swarms" could rescue overloaded web sites
Web sites overwhelmed by sudden popularity could soon rescue themselves by creating a "swarm" of data to be shared between users trying to download the desired files. Newly launched sites have frequently underestimated the number of users they will attract, with the most recent example being the UK government's 1901 Census web site. Over 20 million surfers began searching for their roots on the first day and brought the site to a standstill. It has now been partly closed down to protect other sites hosted at the same location.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991761

Kodak Creates New Wireless Technology Company
The Eastman Kodak Co. today said it will "spin out" technology from its research labs and create a new company dedicated to developing the wireless transmission of high quality video, still images and data. Kodak said the new company, named Appairent Technologies, is part of its strategy of "commercializing its technology to expand the infoimaging category."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173528.html

Drug Company Settles Two Chat Room Speech Cases
A drug research firm on Tuesday paid $107,887 in attorneys' fees and agreed to dismiss two cases against two stockholders who posted negative comments about the company in an Internet chat room. Robert O'Brien, an attorney for San Diego, Calif.-based Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals, told Newsbytes the company settled with Gregory Alcus and a second defendant, identified by the screen name "Dickie13_62301," because the company wanted to focus its energy on other defendants whose suits are still pending.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173527.html

Gun Safety Group Asks FTC To Probe Firearm Web Sites
A new gun safety organization today asked the Federal Trade Commission to expand its probe of post-Sept. 11 false and misleading Web advertising claims to include firearms Web sites. A project under the Alliance for Justice, Gun Industry Watch said in its letter that gun makers should be held to the same standards as Web sites that claim to offer protection from biological and nuclear agents.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173525.html

Michigan Creates Online ‘Cybercourt
Michigan Gov. John Engler, R, today signed into law a bill that creates an online state court. Engler on Tuesday also said that 25 corporations and state groups have joined in an effort to bring broadband Internet access to the entire state. The Cybercourt bill, H.B. 4140, would have jurisdiction over business and commercial complaints in which the dispute is more than $25,000, and is expected to go live in October.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173524.html

More Libraries Filtered In 2001
A reported spike in the number of U.S. libraries using filtering software has rekindled concerns among some civil liberties advocates that library administrators may be bowing under federal pressure to limit access to adult materials on their computers. In a survey published by Library Journal, 43 percent of libraries polled said that they electronically filtered Internet access in 2001, up from 31 percent the previous year.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173523.html

Tech News Site E-Mails Virus To Readers
Officials at SiliconValley.com confirmed that the technology and business news site inadvertently sent a dangerous virus Monday morning to readers of one of its e-mail newsletters. According to Cynthia Funnell, director of corporate communications for Knight Ridder Digital, which operates the site, a message containing an attachment infected with a variant of the data-destroying Magistr e-mail worm was sent to subscribers to "Good Morning Silicon Valley," an e-mail version of a popular daily news roundup section at the site.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173521.html

Hacker Pleads Guilty to Damaging Energy Lab's System
A 22-year-old Minnesota man pleaded guilty Monday to hacking into Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's computer network in 1999, according to a Justice Department statement. Benjamin Troy Breuninger, also known as Kon or Konceptor, faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 plus reimbursement for the damage he caused to the Energy Department network.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173519.html

Gov. Davis Seeks More Surveillance, Greater Privacy
California Gov. Gray Davis said Tuesday he plans to introduce legislation that would give investigators expanded powers to eavesdrop on the state citizens. With nearly the same breath, Davis also pledged to support a measure granting California consumers new privacy rights. In his “State of the State” address Tuesday evening, Davis said he would propose legislation to create “roving” wiretaps, or single court orders authorizing law enforcement to monitor the cell phone, e-mail or any other electronic communications of suspected criminals.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173516.html

Audiogalaxy Installer May Have Harbored Nimda Virus
Thousands of fans of Audiogalaxy Satellite, a popular alternative to the Napster file-sharing application, may have been infected with the Nimda virus, according to users who recently downloaded the program. The software's installer file, AGSetup0608.exe, triggered the anti-virus software of some music fans who downloaded the program Tuesday from a link at CNET's Download.com site. The link re-directs users to a download server operated by Audiogalaxy.com.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173512.html

More news later on

[gazdet]

Thanks for the news WT dude