The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

Girls, don't forget to the newsguy

Microsoft: No relief from security attacks
Microsoft's security response center must be feeling a little punch-drunk these days. After the one-two combination of the Code Red and Nimda worms that targeted the company's server and PC software this past summer, the titan announced an initiative in early October to promote security-savvy administration among its partners. However, almost every week since it announced its Strategic Technology Protection Program, a new security flaw has cropped up. In the past few weeks, holes have been found in Excel and PowerPoint and a new system for protecting music content. A major security patch was issued for Windows XP, and the company had to shut down part of its Passport service to fix a set of flaws in the technology that Microsoft hopes will become the foundation of its .Net initiative.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp01

Bug eats into Apple's iTunes
A bug in some early copies of Apple Computer's iTunes 2 music software has wiped out data from the hard drives of a few people who tried to install the new version of the jukebox program. Apple said the problem, an error in the program that installs the new version of iTunes, affected a "limited number" of Mac owners who were running the Mac OS X operating system and had multiple hard drives or hard drive partition. Apple said it has fixed the problem with a new version and is warning customers to remove the installer.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Hewlett family to oppose HP-Compaq deal
Descendents of Hewlett-Packard co-founder William Hewlett said Tuesday that they plan to oppose the company's blockbuster merger with Compaq Computer. Three of William Hewlett's children -- Walter Hewlett, Eleanor Hewlett Gimon and Mary Hewlett Jaffe -- as well as the family's trust said in a statement that they will vote against the deal if it is brought to a shareholder vote. Walter Hewlett, a member of HP's board as well as chairman of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, said the foundation has also reached a preliminary conclusion to vote its Hewlett-Packard shares against the merger.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

States still mulling over Microsoft
Nine states on Tuesday refused to sign on to a settlement agreement between Microsoft and the Justice Department that has won the support of the other states that are co-plaintiffs in the antitrust case. The settlement agreement remains essentially unchanged from the proposal put forward by the Justice Department and the software giant on Friday. Any changes would be only clarifications and not a substantive reworking, according to the government. At this point, the case will proceed on two tracks. One track will involve settlement hearings as dictated by the Tunney Act, and the other will be be continued litigation with the nine states not agreeing to the settlement. "I'm going to be going forward from this point on two parallel tracks," said U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Sensor-on-a-chip passes fingerprint test
A new fingerprint scanning technology has been unveiled by Florida company AuthenTec. The EntréPad sensor is low power and robust, and the company says it is suitable for cellphone and PDA use as well as fixed installations. Integrated into one chip, the device is less than a centimetre square and uses under ten milliwatts when imaging. The finger under test is applied to the top surface of the chip, which has an especially hardened coating, and identification takes place in under a second. The sensor works by detecting the pattern of living cells beneath the dead epidermis. It creates a low-power field of radio waves that are distorted by the conductive salty fluids in the skin cells.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Bertelsmann's Net gamble
Every afternoon, teenage girls crowd the sidewalk in front of MTV's studios, sending up lovesick screams that bounce off the towering glass and concrete of Times Square and across Broadway to the U.S. headquarters of German media powerhouse Bertelsmann. The scene gives the 5,000 employees at those offices a daily reminder of the vicissitudes of the music industry: MTV, which began as an upstart in the overlooked music-video business 20 years ago, now has unprecedented power to make or break new music with its programming. Today, the Internet offers the promise and peril of an MTV-like revolution -- but this time Bertelsmann and its rivals in the music business are determined to harness the uprising.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=tp_pr

Disney cuts back online staff
Walt Disney Internet Group has undergone another round of layoffs in an effort to cut costs amid an anemic advertising market and a declining economy. Overall, about 125 employees were laid off in the division. Of those, 25 came from ABCNews.com and the rest from WDIG, according to one source close to the companies. Disney confirmed that it has restructured, but declined to say how many employees were laid off. "ABCNews.com has realized efficiencies from better integration with the ABC News television group," ABCNews.com spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said Tuesday. "There will be no changes in the quality and comprehensiveness of the site going forward."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Welcome to the era of drive-by hacking
BBC News Online has been shown just how lax security is on wireless networks used in London's financial centre. On one short trip, two-thirds of the networks we discovered using a laptop and free software tools were found to be wide open. Any maliciously minded hacker could easily join these networks and piggy back on their fast net links, steal documents or subvert other machines on the systems to do their bidding. None of the wireless networks we found used anything but their flawed, in-built security systems to protect against hack attacks.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1639661.stm

New Linux tool boosts security
A small Australian company has released a Linux-based security tool it hopes will help speed corporate acceptance of the open-source operating system. InterSect Alliance has developed the first security auditing system for Linux, beating much larger organizations to the punch. Its new tool, SNARE (System Intrusion Analysis and Reporting Environment), is the first intrusion detection system to reside on individual computers rather than a network, according to Leigh Purdie, principal security consultant for InterSect. How do the two systems differ? While a network-based detection tool enables the consumer to determine when an intrusion is being attempted, the host-based system allows the consumer to identify when an intrusion has been successful.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

IBM makes $40 million open-source offer
IBM announced on Monday that it will donate $40 million of its software tools to the public domain in a move to create an open-source organization aimed at developers. An organization called Eclipse will make available some of IBM's software programming tools to developers to create applications for e-businesses and Web services. More than 150 of the leading open-source companies, such as Linux distributors Red Hat and SuSE, along with Merant, QSSL and Rational, will be part of the Eclipse community. IBM has made a strong push into the open-source sector in recent years. Open source and free software represent a challenge to Microsoft and its ubiquitous Windows operating system software that can cost businesses thousands of dollars a month to license. Open-source applications are generally considered lower-cost alternatives.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Anthrax anxieties push bill payers online
Mail safety concerns raised by recent anthrax scares have prompted a 20 percent increase in the number of Americans viewing and paying bills electronically, according to analyst firm Gartner. The threat of bioterrorism has made the Internet a much more attractive medium for paying bills and checking account balances in America. A Gartner report released on Monday predicts that by the end of 2001, 32 million Americans will be viewing credit card and other statements online -- a 60 percent increase from the 20 million who did so at the end of 2000. A 20 percent increase in e-billing registration has already been observed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=cd_mh

eBay, Amazon offer safety tips to customers
Anthrax worries have prompted eBay and Amazon.com to suggest ways their customers can mail goods to one another. With eBay alone doing about $26 million in transactions every day, there are innumerable packages passing through the hands of buyers and sellers. Amazon sent an e-mail with practical suggestions on mailing goods to customers in its Marketplace, zShops and auction sections, while eBay sent e-mail to its Half.com customers. Customers should wipe away dust or debris from inside and outside the packages they are sending "to help prevent inquiries, misunderstandings or delays," the Amazon e-mail read. Both Amazon and eBay recommend that senders include a return address, note on the package that it is from a seller, and include a written invoice of the transaction.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=ch_mh

U.K. home Web usage levels off
The number of British households connecting to the Internet appears to be leveling off for the first time, according to a new study by telecommunications watchdog Oftel. The United Kingdom experienced a 1 percent drop in the number of homes connected to the Internet this summer, falling from 40 percent in May to 39 percent in August. This is the first time that a dip in British home Internet penetration has been recorded by Oftel since it began monitoring residential consumer behaviour in January 1999. "The study shows that home Internet usage has remained broadly unchanged--but with a 2 to 4 percent margin of error, the 1 percent difference is minimal," an Oftel representative said. The company said it is too early to speculate whether Britain has reached saturation point for home Internet usage.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Engage cuts payments to publishers
In a bid to stay afloat as it turns to other businesses, Engage has asked former customers of its defunct online advertising network to accept little more than half of what they are owed in back payments. Engage sold ad inventory for thousands of Web sites including Motortrend.com and Gorp.com but shut down the business two months ago. On Monday, the CMGI-backed company informed hundreds of Web publishers by letter that it is offering to hand over only 60 percent of expected payments because of poor economic conditions. More than 1,000 sites were operating on the Engage Media Network before its close, producing about $5 million in monthly revenues, according to a former Engage employee familiar with the letter.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Napster rivals winning popularity contest
Alternative file-trading services continue to gain momentum and could soon surpass the granddaddy of song swaps, Napster, at the height of its popularity. Consulting firm Webnoize said Monday that the number of digital music files downloaded using Kazaa, MusicCity and Grokster jumped 20 percent, increasing to 1.81 billion in October from 1.51 billion files in September. The three applications have their own brands, but they use identical software that lets people tap into the same network of computers. Webnoize also found that 1.3 million file traders were typically logged on to the combined network simultaneously in October, compared with 1 million the previous month. Matt Bailey, senior analyst at Webnoize, predicts that by November that number will surpass the popularity of Napster, which had 1.57 million simultaneous users at its peak.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Burger King, AOL cook up promo deal
With that Whopper, would you like a special digital computer code to access enhanced America Online features? No. 2 hamburger chain Burger King and New York media conglomerate AOL Time Warner on Monday announced an Internet marketing initiative that would give Burger King customers access to special features in various AOL publishing, broadcast, music, film and online media. For example, Miami-based Burger King's customers would be given digital codes with purchases to grant them access to special Internet sites available on several America Online brands and on the Burger King site, the companies said.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Winamp locks onto Windows title bars
Microsoft may be nearing a courtroom victory in its historic antitrust battle, but it faces new challenges from rivals intent on stripping away its control of the PC desktop. Programmers on Friday released a software addition for AOL Time Warner's Winamp media player that adds controls to the title bar of Windows applications, a move that apparently ignores Microsoft's interface guidelines for third-party software developers. Yahoo also recently unveiled a package of services, called Yahoo Essentials, that embeds its instant messaging client within Internet Explorer and makes Yahoo the default search engine within the browser address bar. Both moves reflect an ongoing effort by Microsoft competitors to customize interfaces on the desktop in hopes of counteracting the software giant's monopoly advantages -- a step that may become an even higher priority now that the government has all but settled its antitrust suit against the company.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Hitachi DVD drive leaps language barrier
Hitachi is coming out with a multilingual DVD drive. The electronics maker announced on Monday that it has developed a drive that can read and write several formats for recordable and rewritable DVD discs, as well as for recordable and rewritable CDs. The GMA-4020B drive will support DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM formats and will begin shipping in January of next year. Pricing will be determined by retailers, according to a company release from Tokyo. Hitachi representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

EMI Has No Fears of Peers
While the recording industry continues to sue file-trading networks that allow consumers to download music for free, one major label has broken from the pack in its search for business models geared toward those very networks. Within the next month, the FastTrack file-trading network should pass Napster in terms of volume and use, according to a report by Internet research firm Webnoize. That continued growth in popularity of peer-to-peer technology has prompted EMI Recorded Music to offer a limited selection of videos from its Priority Records label through the Gnutella network.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,48147,00.html

Crazy Finns Forge 3-D for PDAs
In Viking mythology, the gods blunted their weapons to get results. Thor wielded his hammer, Mjollnir, to smash the skulls of his enemies. And ogres conjured storms by pounding the earth with their iron clubs. Now a group of battle-hardened developers, the Odins and Friggs of Helsinki's coding underworld, are shaping plain-old PDAs and smart phones into 3-D gaming devices. Helsinki's Fathammer has created a near-desktop-quality 3-D multimedia gaming platform, X-Forge, for devices that run Microsoft's PocketPC operating system, the Symbian OS and mobile Linux. An interactive demo of X-Forge, which runs smoothly on a Compaq iPAQ PDA, is loaded with equal parts peppy music, 3-D wizardry and Norse fantasy.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,47850,00.html

Afghan Archivist of Culture
A brightly colored fresco lines the halls of an old temple, depicting images of a thriving culture. A museum with an impressive modern art collection attracts tourists from all over the world. This was Afghanistan 25 years ago. "At that time, it was a beautiful country filled with lush flowers," said Solaimon Olumee, an Afghan-American painter. "Women weren't covered. National Geographic called it a 'great vacation spot.'" But because the majority of Afghanistan's intellectual and artistic community has left, the country's cultural history is on the verge of extinction. Farhad Azad is hoping to bring it back. With his website, he wants to archive what he believes to be a vital piece of Afghanistan's history.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,47842,00.html

One Company's Bogus Bonus
John Schuett got laid off from a Silicon Valley telecom firm and was asked to repay $1,250 of a signing bonus because he didn't stay at the firm a full year. Schuett got a $2,500 signing bonus when he joined San Jose-based Valiant Networks. He lost his job in October after six months. Soon after, the company sent a letter threatening to send a collection agency after him if he didn't return half the bonus. "I'm furious," said Schuett. Valiant CFO John Zavoli said the troubled firm is just sticking to agreements employees signed. The firm has cut about 90 jobs, or 75 percent of its work force, in a series of layoffs. Schuett's employment letter stipulated that he repay the money if his employment was "severed," and the firm is obliged to collect on debts.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48190,00.html

Molecular Farming Under Fire
The next wave of genetically altered plants are on the horizon, and activists are warning the hue and cry over plant molecular farming will dwarf any previous controversy over other such products. The new outcry over plant molecular farming coincides with a public forum currently underway in Ottawa. The federal government's Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has called for the public's views on plant molecular farming -- or "pharming" as it's sometimes referred to in the industry. The one-day forum and three-day technical conference are meant to help the CFIA as they draft new regulatory directives for 2002. While no plants for molecular farming are currently approved in Canada, the government wants its regulatory framework in place before the practice takes off.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,48108,00.html

Anti-U.S. Hackers May Step Up Attacks - FBI
The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center warned Friday of an increased threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on computer networks. According to an advisory released at the NIPC Web site, the organization "has reason to believe that the potential for future DDoS attacks is high." The NIPC advised network infrastructure operators to "take a defensive posture and remain vigilant at a higher state of alert." The warning did not say whether any specific networks were at particular risk of DDoS attacks, nor did it identify any groups or individuals suspected of launching potential attacks.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171850.html

Anthrax outbreak to be simulated at UK post room
The UK Health and Safety Executive plans to release non-harmful bacterial spores into a postal sorting office to understand how biological weapons such as anthrax can spread. The initiative follows the anthrax terrorist attacks in the US, in which a small number of letters have led to widespread contamination. This is due to dispersal of the agent through the postal system, and the UK test will look for ways of preventing this. The common bacterium Bacillus globigii will be put into envelopes and packages and processed through normal postal sorting equipment at a secret location in the UK. Bacillus globigii is found naturally in soil and has been used to simulate anthrax attacks in the past.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991523

Global warming 'altering genes'
Global warming is leading to changes in the genetic make-up of animals, say scientists. They have found that mosquitoes have altered their genes in response to climate change. According to biologists at the University of Oregon, US, many plants and animals are adapting to a warming environment by taking advantage of the longer seasons. British birds now lay their eggs more than a week earlier than they did in the 1970s. And frogs are spawning about 10 days earlier. But the Oregon study is the first clear evidence that the genes of animals are changing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1639284.stm

Man eats worms to win GameCube
Nintendo of America has announced the winner of its "What would you do for a GameCube?" contest. Corey Olcsvary beat out four other finalists from across the nation to become the contest's grand-prize winner. Olcsvary performed the most outrageous stunt, as he became a Pikmin by shaving his head, donning a leaf, painting himself blue, and eating a bowl of Pikmin food, which included worms and crickets. As his prize, Olcsvary took home a Nintendo GameCube, a Game Boy Advance handheld, a video game software package, and $5,000 in cash.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...822490,00.html

EFF Counsels 'Betamax Defense' For Morpheus
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is backing the distributor of a popular file-swapping program targeted in an entertainment-industry lawsuit, comparing MusicCity's defense of its Morpheus peer-to-peer software to Sony's epic battle with Hollywood on behalf of its Betamax VCR nearly 20 years ago. However, Sony is one company that doesn't agree with the comparison. Its Sony Music Entertainment record company and Columbia Pictures motion picture business are two of some 29 music and movie outfits behind a copyright-infringement lawsuit naming Tennessee-based MusicCity and two other peer-to-peer technology companies.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171903.html
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171896.html

'White Hat' Hackers Threaten Information Anarchy
Responding to an effort by Microsoft to squelch the full disclosure of software vulnerabilities, a group of "white hat" hackers is putting out a call to other experts, asking them to deluge software vendors with bug reports. "Let's flood the security department of every vendor with new issues. Let's show the world what they would miss and what information could just as easily have stayed in the underground," wrote a security researcher who uses the nickname "HellNbak," in an announcement posted to several security mailing lists last week. So far, only one prominent organization has signed on to the "Information Anarchy 2K01" initiative - a group known as Nomad Mobile Research Center, of whom HellNbak is a member.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171900.html

Dumpster diving on the Web
Brewster Kahle may be the last Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur in the waning days of 2001 who isn't embarrassed to boast about his Big Idea. Maybe that's because he's not trying to make any money with it. "The last time someone really tried to do this it was 2,000 years ago. It's the chutzpah of the Greeks," he bragged at the launch party for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on Oct. 24. "There are only 5 billion people in the world and they can only be typing 60 words a minute, 24 hours a day. So, that bounds it," he said to an admiring audience of librarians, academics and computer scientists gathered at UC-Berkeley's Bancroft Library.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ack/index.html

Software that puts porn in the trash
Can a computer be programmed to recognize pornographic images? Several firms are betting on new software that opens e-mail attachments, recognizes porn, and throws it in the trash before it even gets to you. The various programs are designed in part to clean up corporate e-mail, which they say often contains porn — one firm claims between 1 and 2 percent of all work e-mail can be described as pornographic. Acting as a sort of e-mail go-between, MessageLabs is in a prime position to poke through the digital missives checking for illegal or unwanted pornography. Doing so by hand is impractical, so the firm decided to do the next best thing — it licensed software from a company that claims it can teach computers to recognize and ferret out unsavory pictures.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/653155.asp?0dm=C17NT

More news later on

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