The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Embedded Linux alive and kicking
The hype that spawned several Linux start-ups has vanished, but a pioneer in operating systems for computing devices other than PCs still has faith that Linux is the foundation for success. MontaVista Software has raised $28 million from earlier investors and from new partners including IBM Microelectronics and Sony, said Jim Ready, founder and chief executive. "This carries us to profitability and greater heights," Ready said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-821240.html

Netscape seeks more than money
Netscape's civil lawsuit against Microsoft is a vote of no confidence in the government's handling of the case and a competitive attempt to influence the outcome of the larger antitrust trial, say analysts and legal experts. Netscape, which AOL Time Warner acquired in 1999, filed the civil suit in federal court here Tuesday. The company is seeking unspecified damages, which could be tripled later on, and a jury trial. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-821312.html

Watchdog: MS, DOJ broke antitrust rules
An antitrust research group said on Wednesday it plans to file a lawsuit against Microsoft and the U.S. Justice Department, charging that both failed to fully disclose contacts that led to a proposed settlement of the case against the software giant. The American Antitrust Institute (AAI) has set a news conference for Thursday to release details of its suit and a request that the judge overseeing the remainder of the antitrust case wait for full disclosure of the communications before passing judgment on the settlement.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-821410.html

Scientists: Fight flaws with laws
Software makers should be legally liable for security holes in their products, according to a group of U.S. scientists. The National Academy of Sciences is recommending that policy-makers create laws that would hold companies accountable for security breaches resulting from vulnerable products. In a report released last week, titled "Cybersecurity Today and Tomorrow: Pay Now or Pay Later," NAS researchers urged lawmakers to take "steps that would increase the exposure of software and system vendors and system operators to liability for system breaches."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-821390.html

Twist in eBay hacking case
A 22-year-old former Los Alamos National Laboratory worker accused of breaking into the computers of eBay, Exodus Communications and several other companies successfully dismissed his lawyer on Wednesday, despite a federal judge's repeated urgings that he reconsider. In a strange twist to the year-old case, Jerome T. Heckenkamp filed last week to put himself back into custody, so that a friend who posted his $50,000 bail would no longer be responsible for Heckenkamp's conduct.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-821413.html

Intel laptops get a memory boost
Intel laptops got a speed boost on Wednesday, as Taiwan's Via Technologies released the first chipset allowing the Pentium mobile chips to use a next-generation form of memory called DDR (double data-rate) DRAM. The new chipset is another victory for the DDR standard over competing RDRAM. Analysts say that even though DDR is getting more expensive, and now costs almost as much as RDRAM, resistance to Rambus' memory type (RDRAM) remains strong.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-820868.html

PGP creator: Snooping must be curbed
Phil Zimmermann, creator of Pretty Good Privacy encryption -- better known as PGP -- was in Italy this week for the InfoSecurity conference. ZDNet Italy caught up with him to discuss the technical, social and politic implications of his encryption tool. At 47 years old, Zimmermann is already a legend in the computing industry. As the inventor of the famous Pretty Good Privacy encryption tool, he faced a 3-year-long investigation by the U.S. government for illegal export of weapons.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-821078.html

Napster settlement delayed
A federal judge has delayed issuing a decision on the recording industry's copyright infringement lawsuit against song-swap service Napster, giving the two sides until Feb. 17 to reach a settlement. A representative for Napster said Wednesday that U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel agreed to a Jan. 17 request for a 30-day stay on a summary judgment ruling.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-821400.html

Airline industry grounds high-speed Net
High-speed Internet access on airplanes isn't such a high-flying idea anymore. Instead, it's become the latest victim of the economic malaise and the attacks of Sept. 11. The two leading makers of high-speed Internet equipment for airplanes say many airlines are delaying projects to wire up their fleets. Airlines are instead focusing on cutting costs and flight schedules to deal with a travel downturn. The latest moves have put a temporary kibosh on the movement to let airplane passengers stream movies or get telephone calls while in flight.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-821562.html

City restricts cybercafes after killing
The Southern California city of Garden Grove has imposed restrictions on cybercafes, hoping to quell real-life violence that has mirrored the virtual mayhem depicted in computer games played in the cafes. Garden Grove Mayor Bruce Broadwater said the regulations, approved by the City Council on Tuesday night, were prompted by a Dec. 30 killing outside one of the city's many such establishments. "One boy came to the front of the cybercafe and put a screwdriver through another boy's skull," he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-821405.html

Tech firms pitch politicians on security
Homeland security is the new post-Sept. 11 watchword not only for states and localities struggling to prepare for all kinds of potential disasters but also for high-tech companies eying new markets. With emergency planning top of the agenda for local authorities across the country in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, companies once focused on the private sector are hoping to grab local officials' attention with newly adapted software.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-821407.html

When a phone call is a luxury
Forget the custom-made Snoopy phone cover, the future of mobiles for the wealthy lies in high-cost, high-fashion handsets. Nokia is setting up a subsidiary called Vertu to make luxury phones for the seriously loaded. Top-of-the-range phones are not new. Ericsson has made gold-plated versions of its phones and Motorola has upgraded some of its handsets to appeal to wealthy customers. With Vertu, Nokia is going one step further, it aims to create mobile phones that, one day, could be regarded as expensive antiques.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1775496.stm

The missile defense shield will help neutralize the tech sector
President Bush's problem-plagued missile-defense initiative promises to dramatically shift the balance of power between the technology community and the federal government. The controversial program has two key ingredients that make that outcome all but inevitable: an enormous and flexible budget for procuring high-tech goods and services -- more than $8 billion this year alone -- and no requirement whatsoever that any of those goods or services actually work. Government boondoggles are regrettably common.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/beat/

New Payment Methods Give Old-fashioned Checks and Credit Cards a Run for Their Money
Waiting on line at Starbucks this season, you’ll probably be hoping the woman ordering the cafe latte in front of you isn’t going to fish out change, use a credit card that will require authorization and a signature, or worse yet, pull out a checkbook. No, you’d be better off if that person has a Starbucks card. With one swipe of this prepaid “stored value” card, money will be deducted from her balance, without any required signature. And when the purchaser gets back to the office, she can add funds to her card online.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/a...3&homepage=yes

More Asian companies adopting Linux
Asian companies are increasingly running their server applications on the Linux operating system, driven primarily by cost concerns. A new survey of 850 companies by Gartner Asia-Pacific revealed that 15 percent of companies in the region -- excluding Japan -- used Linux in the fourth quarter. In the same quarter of 2000, the adoption rate was between 5 percent and 7 percent, said Phil Sargeant, Gartner Asia-Pacific's research director for servers and storage.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-821073.html?tag=cd_mh

Aimster changes name, adds fee service
File-swapping company Aimster has renamed its service and started a drive to turn free users into paying customers. Aimster founder Johnny Deep said he transferred the Aimster name to America Online last week and rebranded the company Madster.com. In May, Aimster lost the rights to its domain name after an arbitration panel decided the name violated the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) trademark. Madster remains free, but the company has added a subscription service that offers features such as better connectivity and recommendations from other members.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-821080.html?tag=cd_mh

Two charged in piracy crackdown
Two Los Angeles men have been charged with copyright infringement in a crackdown against a massive software piracy ring that allegedly copied movies, games and other programs and traded them freely over the Internet. Kentaga Kartadinata, 29, and Mike Nguyen, 26, were the first members of the "DrinkorDie" ring charged since Dec. 11, when the U.S. government seized computers in over 100 raids nationwide in an attempt to break up the group and others like it.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-820938.html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on