The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

It's friday, so I offer coffee to all readers to celebrate this
G.SHDSL: Faster DSL means faster downloads
An emerging high-speed Internet standard in Europe holds potential for faster download speeds and broader availability for many U.S. businesses -- if they're willing to wait a while. Although DSL speeds vary widely, the new G.SHDSL could be two to three times faster than most versions of DSL targeted at business customers. The G.SHDSL standard also can deliver data farther than earlier DSL technologies, which are limited to a relatively short distance. Some European communications carriers are using the faster DSL (digital subscriber line) technology on a limited basis. "The European market will see this. And the (U.S. local phone companies) are looking at deploying it to replace their business offerings now," said Pat Hurley, a DSL analyst at TeleChoice, a communications industry market research firm.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp01

Next antitrust hearings to focus on XP
Government lawyers said they will make Microsoft Corp.'s powerful new Windows XP software a central focus in the final round of court hearings in their landmark antitrust case against the company. In a filing in U.S. District Court here, state and federal officials proposed a schedule under which the bitterly fought case would resume this fall with briefs and depositions, followed by formal hearings on a new remedy beginning Feb. 4 that could rewrite the rules of competition in the computer industry. In the filing, jointly prepared with Microsoft, the two sides also confirmed that settlement talks have been under way and will proceed during these court hearings. The company and the government "will continue to seek settlement of this matter through private discussions, which are ongoing and should continue simultaneously" with remedy proceedings, the filing said.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Nimda picking up speed in Europe
The persistent Nimda computer virus, which attacks corporate computer systems and personal computers alike, regained momentum in Europe overnight while it showed signs of weakening elsewhere around the globe. Security experts sounded a fresh wave of warning calls on Friday that infestation continues at an increasing pace. According to security software firm Trend Micro, the number of infected computers in Europe jumped fivefold in the past 24 hours to 41,800 as of 7:30 a.m. EDT. Meanwhile, reported cases of Nimda infections appeared to be on the decline in the US and Asia as of late on Thursday, officials said.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Linux gets an e-biz boost from Borland
Development tools specialist Borland is to offer Web services support for the Linux operating system -- a move it argued will build support for Linux for e-business. Web services will be added to Borland's Kylix Linux-based rapid application development (RAD) software. At Borland's conference in London this week, the company said the Web service features will be available in the fourth quarter of 2001. "This is very welcome," said Gary Barnett of analyst firm Ovum. "Borland is in a large and growing group that has got on the Web services bandwagon, but it has more credibility than some others." Jason Vokes, Borland's European product line manager for RAD products, said: "Kylix is the equivalent of (Borland's) Delphi 6 RAD product that runs on Windows. Delphi has recently been updated to include Web services and Kylix is now to be extended in the same way."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

More negative news for cell phone users
Mobile phones may cause damage to health by speeding up the brain's response times, a British scientist told a conference on Friday. As consumer concerns mount that prolonged mobile phone use could lead to problems ranging from headaches to tumors, a recent study showing an alarming rate of brain cancer in some cellphone users is helping swing scientific opinion in Britain. Dr. Alan Preece, head of Biophysics at Bristol Oncology Center, is among a group of scientists becoming increasingly convinced that radiation from cellphones triggers chemical processes in the body that may be harmful.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

DVD writer puts 9.4GB on disk
Storage firm LaCie is launching two new DVD writers, one of which allows up to 9.4GB of data on a single disk. Available from early October, the drives are intended for archiving and backup, as well as creating DVD movie disks. However, most PC users will need FireWire adapters to use them. LaCie's new DVDRW supports DVD-R and CD-RW media, as well as its own 4.7GB rewritable DVD-RW disks. A second new drive, the DVDRAM/R supports DVD-R as well as double-sided DVD-RAM cartridges that can store up to 9.4GB. Both are external units. LaCie's UK general manager, George Leptos, said that the DVD-RAM/R was particularly attractive because it offered users up to 9.4GB of rewritable storage as well as the ability to master DVD-compatible disks.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

DOJ: High-tech needed for anti-terror proposal
The U.S. Department of Justice wants its wiretapping and other surveillance capabilities vastly expanded, with the Internet and other modern communications technologies among the targets of the government's new war on terrorism, according to experts who are familiar with a new Department of Justice proposal. The proposal should be officially released next week said a DOJ official. It would apply telephone wiretapping rules to the Internet and it would formally endorse Carnivore, the e-mail surveillance tool of the department that has been vehemently denounced by civil liberties advocates since its discovery last year, said David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Until now, Attorney General John Ashcroft had not announced whether he would permit the use of Carnivore.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Napster clones face financial woes
Droves of Napster clones are proving that it's still cheap and easy to create file-swapping services under the nose of the entertainment industry -- but such ventures promise mostly high risks and little pay for the people behind them. Even as the U.S. courts have effectively shut down file-trading giant Napster, numerous would-be replacements have taken root. Most hope to avoid legal entanglements and eventually profit on the immense popularity of services that offer free access to popular music, videos and other files. Like the evanescent "eyeballs" that lured venture capitalists to sink billions into failed dot-coms, the staggering number of consumers signing up for file-swapping services has been a siren's call to developers. Already, millions of people have migrated to start-ups such as MusicCity, Audiogalaxy and Aimster.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

How video games influenced the WTC attack
What's being called the Attack on America is going to change things in many ways, both large and small, some predictable, some not so easy to predict. One of the small issues is that users of Microsoft's Flight Simulator game will no longer be able to crash a simulated 757 into a realistic graphic of the World Trade Center. Yet this small change -- a concession by Microsoft to not offend its customers -- brings up the larger issue of gaming and learning. It has already played an actual role in the attacks -- with the terrorists using flight simulators used to train commercial pilots to hone their deadly skills -- and could play another role in the outcome.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/co...pt=zdnn_nbs_hl

Will the war on terrorism be a recession buster?
Will last week's terrorist attacks and the coming war effort finally plunge the U.S. economy into the recession it's been teetering on the brink of for months? Or will the opposite happen? Might wartime spending act as a fiscal stimulus package that would jump-start the country's flagging finances? Congress has already approved $40 billion in spending to rebuild and fight terrorism after last week's attacks, and there's a good chance that many more billions will be ladled for tasks such as rescuing the beleaguered airline industry and upgrading national security. Economists are hoping that the burst of wartime spending will counteract not only the financial fallout from last week's attacks, but also the long decline of the economy over the last year.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/0...lus/index.html

Taliban rejects demand for bin Laden
Rejecting President Bush's point-blank demand, the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan refused Friday to hand over Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind behind the worst terrorist attacks in American history. The Pentagon deployed additional planes to support a military buildup in the Persian Gulf. On the morning after Bush outlined plans for a global war on terrorism in a nationally televised address, Congress struggled to nail down final details of multibillion-dollar legislation to stabilize the nation's ailing airlines. But the nation's economic uncertainty was reflected in a gyrating stock market, down sharply, then up, then down again -- all before noon.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7246050.html

Government Web sites busy after attacks
Magazine special editions and Web sites updated around the clock don't seem to be enough to quench the public's thirst for news on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. So, thousands of people have found ways to get information directly from the source. The Internet pages of government agencies have been busy as never before in the days following the crash of hijacked planes in New York, outside Washington and in Pennsylvania -- second only to news Web sites.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7248273.html

Sony unveils palm-sized camcorder
Sony has unveiled what it claims is the world's smallest network digital camcorder, measuring the length of a handheld computer and weighing less than 11 ounces. Called the DCR-IP7E Network Handycam IP (Image Portal), the camcorder will be available in stores across Asia by November for $1,720. The unit allows video buffs to surf the Web and send e-mails with video attachments when used with a compatible Bluetooth-enabled cell phone or Sony's Bluetooth 56kbps modem adapter. The camcorder can hold up to 50 e-mail messages and addresses. The device accepts JPEG, TIFF and MPEG attachments, which are automatically stored on the Sony Memory Stick when received as e-mail.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

Attack Can't Erase Stored Data
A week after a terrorist attack obliterated their offices, tenants of the World Trade Center are slowly piecing their businesses back together again. In addition to the horrific human toll -– thousands of WTC employees are missing and assumed dead –- companies that were housed in the towers are facing computer equipment losses to the tune of $500 million, according to financial services firm Morgan Stanley. But one asset most tenants avoided losing on Sept. 11 was electronic data. They had learned a valuable lesson after the 1993 WTC bombing: Back up information often and completely.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47004,00.html

Infected DSL Users Get 86ed
Educate yourself about computer security or get the hell off the Internet is the message that some Internet service providers are delivering to their customers. Frustrated with users who can't or won't configure their computers to stop the spread of worms and viruses, some broadband access providers have now decided to cut service to customers whose machines are infected with worms such as Code Red and Nimda. Only computers that run unpatched Windows 2000 and NT operating systems using Microsoft's IIS Web server software are vulnerable to infection by Code Red and Nimda.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47037,00.html

China Quietly Unblocks U.S. Sites
Chinese Internet censors quietly unblocked several major U.S. media websites this week in a surprise move that one Chinese expert said may have been prompted by a demand for news about the U.S. terrorist attacks. The change grants China's Web-using public access to the previously unviewable sites of The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe, which were blocked as recently as Sunday. It was unclear exactly what day the unblocking occurred. Among those still blocked are the sites of CNN, Voice of America, Time magazine and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as a slew of Western human rights groups including Amnesty International.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47017,00.html

The Little Screensaver That Could
IBM is spending $100 million building the world's fastest supercomputer to do cutting-edge medical research, but a distributed computing effort running on ordinary PCs may have beaten Big Blue to the punch. IBM's proposed Blue Gene, a massively parallel supercomputer, in hopes to help diagnose and treat disease by simulating the ultra-complex process of protein folding. The monster machine will be capable of more than 1 quadrillion operations per second and will be 1,000 times faster than Deep Blue, the computer that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, IBM said.But Folding@Home, a modest distributed computing project run by Dr. Vijay Pande and a group of graduate students at Stanford University, has already managed to simulate how proteins self-assemble, something that computers, until now, have not been able to do.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,46982,00.html

Devices Unite to Find Drugs
A virtual supercomputer looking for potential cancer medicines is yielding impressive results. A search for potential cancer drugs by chip maker Intel and United Devices, a distributed computing company, is screening candidate medicines at a much faster rate than was previously thought possible. In the five months since its launch in April, the Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project has identified 60,000 molecules that may inhibit cancer growth. The Intel-UD software, which is a screensaver like SETI@Home and Folding@Home, searches for molecules that bind with cancer cells to prevent them from replicating.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47013,00.html

Americans want Uncryption
Three in four Americans favour tough anti-encryption laws, in the wake of last week's terrorist atrocities, a survey finds. Seventy-two per cent believe anti-encryption laws will be "somewhat" or "very" helpful in combating terrorism, according to the survey, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. The survey found that 54 per cent of those asked "would favour reducing encryption of communications to make it easier for the FBI and CIA to monitor the activities of suspected terrorists - EVEN IF it might infringe on people's privacy and affect business practices".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/21791.html

Warner Bros. Plans Re-Release of Kubrick's '2001'
Warner Bros. film studio on Thursday said it will release a digitally enhanced version of director Stanley Kubrick's classic meditation on man and machine, "2001: A Space Odyssey'', in movie theaters this October. The science-fiction movie debuted in 1968 and set the world astir with its tale of man's excursions into deep space and his interaction with an evil computer named HAL. When originally released, the film sparked controversy over the future use of computers and whether they would come to control people's lives. This new version of the original 70 mm film has been digitally enhanced, and the soundtrack has been remastered for today's theaters.
http://www.space.com/news/2001_rerelease_010921.html

The World Wide Translator
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars and decades of research, gibberishes typify the results of language translation software. As a result, the translation business hasn't come very far from its days as a cottage industry — an expensive, time-consuming process dependent on highly specialized human translators. Globalization companies hope to break through this barrier with software that employs translation memory — a way to use past translations to speed new ones. But building a useful database of translations is a slow and expensive endeavor, and companies guard their translations jealously.
http://www.techreview.com/web/leo/leo092101.asp

Forestry Companies Take A Cut At Cybersquatters
With forestry and paper-making companies Mead Corp. and Westvaco Corp. on the brink of a merger, it seems that one of their first joint efforts won't be the manufacture of envelopes or cardboard boxes, but a hunt for cybersquatters they say have stolen their names for Internet addresses. Early on Aug. 29, the two companies announced their plans to join in a $3 billion stock-swap transaction. That same day, as investors were learning about the new company, to be called MeadWestvaco, individuals providing Korean addresses were registering Internet domains such as MeadWestvaco.com, Mead-Westvaco.com (with a hyphen), and MeadWestvaco.net.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170383.html

Windows XP Review: Stable But Often Annoying
. Six years ago, Microsoft unveiled a new operating system that it promised would work faster, more reliably and more simply than anything it had ever made before. Now it's about to make the same offer. Windows 95 never quite lived up to that billing, but Windows XP — short for "experience" — just might. Whether it's worthy of today's hype is another question. The best reason to pay XP's $99 upgrade price ($199 for Windows 95 users) is its stability. The three weeks I've tested this system — which starts shipping with new PCs on Monday and arrives in stores Oct. 25 — have been almost free of system crashes and hangs.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170382.html

European Privacy Groups Lobby EU On Privacy Issues
Seven European privacy and civil liberties groups are lobbying European ministers to consider all the issues before rushing through anti- terrorist legislation that could endanger the rights of individual Internet users. In an open letter to the European Council, which has been scheduled to meet this evening in Brussels, Belgium, the privacy and civil liberties groups are requesting European leaders "to refrain from new and extended communications interception and lawful access powers for police forces and intelligences services." The council meeting is being held to discuss several security issues that have arisen in the wake of the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks across the U.S.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170377.html

Governments struggle to second guess terrorists' next move
As the dust starts to settle on the terrorist atrocities in the US, governments around the world are urgently reviewing their counter-terrorist measures. One of their biggest unknowns is whether terrorists are now likely to stick to the low-tech approach of 11 September, or whether they will turn to chemical or biological weapons. The question is urgent, because vast amounts of government money worldwide are soon likely to be channelled towards developing better counter-terrorism approaches. But which? Attacks like those on New York and Washington DC are based on undermining the infrastructure of urban society and the measures needed to guard against these are largely unexplored. Until the attacks on the US, virtually every analysis of the terrorist threat, and much counter-terrorism funding, assumed the enemy would use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991327
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/...get/index.html

A Saddam connection?
Even as the Bush administration and the national media focus almost exclusively on Osama bin Laden as the seemingly preordained "prime suspect" in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, evidence is beginning to emerge that a more familiar enemy may also have been involved in the devastation: Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The central trail of evidence appears to show bin Laden's unquestionable complicity, but a second, subtler set of footprints may lead to Saddam's door. That trail originates with the first World Trade Center bombing, with evidence that some analysts believe links the 1993 operation to Iraq. That theory has gained currency over the past few years among some intelligence experts, including former CIA director R. James Woolsey.
http://www.salon.com/politics/featur...raq/index.html

U.S. probes bin Laden's finances
Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network raise money through a variety of legitimate and illegal sources, ranging from charities, business enterprises and wealthy supporters to illegal drug and weapons trafficking, the U.S. government believes. Investigators and experts believe members of bin Laden's al-Qaida network make money any way they can to support the cause. There are strong signs al-Qaida has profited handsomely from the opium trade, with fighters used as smugglers and to protect smugglers, said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/...den/index.html

Bush: America "called to defend freedom"
President Bush asked the American people Thursday night to be prepared for a protracted and difficult war against global terrorism, saying America was "a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom." In a momentous 30-minute address to Congress delivered nine days after terrorists carried out the most deadly nonmilitary attacks on the United States in its history, Bush sought to rally public support for a new kind of war. "Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution," Bush said. "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." Speaking in a resolute tone in which confidence was tempered by seriousness, Bush threw down the gauntlet to Afghanistan's ruling Taliban party, demanding that it immediately hand over suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and all other terrorists. "These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion," Bush said to one of the loudest of the speech's many interruptions by bipartisan applause.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ech/index.html

HP told to pay three-and-half years' CD-R drive royalties
Hewlett-Packard has been ordered by a German court to reveal how many CD-R and CD-RW drives it has sold in the country during the last three and a half years. The order is the latest chapter in story going back almost as long. Sued by the music makers and publishers as an exemplar CD-R drive maker, HP was forced in February 1998 to pay a fixed fee to cover past sales of CD burners. The company agreed to a future per-unit levy on drives sold after the first of that month. The case centred on the use of CD recording equipment to duplicate music CDs. Germany levies a per-unit fee on other types of recording equipment, and the music industry wanted computer-based drives to be included too.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/21823.html

More news later on

[Sinner]

[walktalker]

Originally posted by Spartacus

jesus.