The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

Assorted stories
Windows XP nears the finish line
Microsoft is preparing to clear an important hurdle for delivering Windows XP, but outside forces still could trip up the new operating system. The company on Saturday will issue Windows XP Release Candidate 2 -- the expected final testing version -- Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin said Friday during a media conference call. But as Microsoft puts the finishing touches on the new version of the Windows operating system, the company faces a growing controversy over the new software. Rather than generating the excitement of the Windows 95 launch, where hordes of people lined up outside computer stores for early copies, Windows XP is the focus of competitive and government forces seeking to delay the new operating system's release.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdhpnews01

The truth behind the MS-open source fight
People who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. I forget who said it first -- I always remember it from a speech by John F. Kennedy. He was talking about governments and their citizens. He might as well have been describing Microsoft and the residents of the industry it dominates so completely. You are doubtlessly aware of the debate over so-called "free software," of which the most visible proponent is the Linux community. However, the real debate isn't so much about technology as economic opportunity, about "little people" who feel disenfranchised and "big people" who don't understand what the fuss is all about.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/co...799071,00.html

Arrest may spark review of copyright law
He's an unlikely poster child for a movement to change a major U.S. law. But the plight of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, who was arrested last week, is again shining the spotlight on a controversial law designed to expand copyright protections into the digital age. Federal agents nabbed Sklyarov at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas after he talked about a program that can crack Adobe Systems' e-book encryption. Prosecutors have filed criminal charges against him because they say the program violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law designed to protect copyrights in the digital age. The arrest has prompted protesters to march on Adobe headquarters and free-speech groups to swoop in and take his case. The Electronic Frontier Foundation met Friday with federal prosecutors in an attempt to get them to drop the charges, but the group did not succeed. And some lawmakers are taking a new look at the DMCA.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

You have not seen the last of SirCam
Antivirus experts expect the SirCam virus to take a breather over the weekend, but it may pick up new steam as vacationing Europeans return to work Monday. "Today looks like it's going to be our biggest day yet for this virus," Mark Sunner, chief technology officer at British e-mail filtering company Message Labs, said Friday. "It should drop off over the weekend, but I would imagine we'll see a big upsurge on Monday that will probably beat this week's numbers. "This one has a lot of staying power because it's using a multilevel approach," Sunner said. The SirCam worm, which surfaced last week, spreads by e-mailing copies of itself to everyone in the infected computer's Windows address book. It also sends itself to any e-mail addresses contained in the Web browser's cache files, which store recently viewed pages.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

'Code Red': What went wrong?
For one moment last week, the Internet stood still. At midnight Thursday, July 19 GMT, more than 350,000 servers infected with the so-called Code Red worm stopped hammering the Internet with scans searching for vulnerable computers. Instead, the servers targeted an Internet address used as the hub for the White House's public Web site with a denial-of-service attack of such proportions that some feared parts of the Internet would shut down, unable to cope with the unprecedented flood of data. "If this goes along what it's looking like, parts of the Net will go down," predicted Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer at network-protection company eEye Digital Security. A month earlier, the Aliso Viejo, Calif., company discovered the flaw exploited by the worm in Microsoft's Web servers and was the first to decode the malicious program.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Feds will pursue Russian programmer case
Don't expect Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov to walk free anytime soon. Sklyarov, who is being held on criminal charges for allegedly violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was arrested at a hacker convention last week in Las Vegas after he gave a presentation about technology he created that can be used to crack Adobe Systems' e-books. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing Sklyarov, met with prosecutors in San Francisco on Friday, urging them to let him go. Though the EFF characterized the talks as "productive," the organization said in a release that "the U.S. attorney's office gave no indication of dropping the prosecution against Dmitry Sklyarov."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Digital rights company snags patent
Digital rights management company ContentGuard said Friday it has received a patent for a "digital ticket," which lets copyright holders distribute and track people's access to digital goods such as music, video, e-books and images. Bethesda, Md.-based ContentGuard, which is backed by Xerox and Microsoft, said the digital ticket is similar to the way a ticket in the physical world allows people to gain access to a concert or a baseball game. With a digital ticket, people can view an e-book or listen to music for a specific number of times without being locked down to a single device. ContentGuard said the digital ticket is a set of tamper-resistant codes that are put in a computer or embedded onto cell phone chips or plastic cards similar to credit cards. The code validates whether a person has certain rights to access specific digital content.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Net music faces patent squeeze
Online music companies may have a new headache to deal with after a recent court decision on a download-technology patent. While patent adversaries feud publicly over the terms of a confidential settlement and the significance of the ruling, the underlying suit could make it more expensive for companies including AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, RealNetworks and Amazon.com to offer streaming audio, music samples and other services over the Internet. The patent in question belongs to Intouch Group, a 15-employee digital music company in Berkeley, Calif., that has sued Amazon, AOL Time Warner's Entertaindom, Liquid Audio, Muze, Listen.com and Loudeye Technologies' DiscoverMusic, accusing them of infringing its patent covering a potentially wide range of downloadable and streaming music.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Intel aims Pentium 4 at the masses
A new chipset and aggressive pricing may finally push Intel's Pentium 4 processor -- now segregated in high-end PCs -- into the computing mainstream. Pentium 4 sales have lagged behind expectations since the processor was introduced late last year. But analysts say the forthcoming 845 chipset -- which will allow the Pentium 4 to work with standard SDRAM memory rather than with expensive Rambus DRAM -- combined with further processor price cuts should drive down Pentium 4 PCs to prices that will appeal to average consumers. Intel "did what it needed to do. The corporate market didn't want Rambus in the mainstream for better or worse," said Mike Feibus, principal analyst at Mercury Research, which recently bumped up its forecast for Pentium 4 shipments this year.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Laughing All the Way to the Bank
Justatip.com could have easily been just another dot-com casualty. The Web site, which enables users to e-mail colleagues, friends and foes, and even the boss anonymous "tips" about body odor, back hair, and other vexing problems, was a money loser. Big surprise. Four college students, whose only goal was to take their fondness for playing pranks into cyberspace, launched the site last July. There was no real business model to speak of. Just dudes, all avid readers of the humor rag The Onion, looking to have some fun. But the buzz on the site spread through America's dorm rooms and workplaces like an e-mail virus. Two weeks after Justatip's debut, the server that the founders were renting for a mere $50 a month crashed from all the traffic, forcing them to upgrade to a $600 monthly Web-hosting contract.
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz...010726_132.htm

Software scans crowd movement for trouble
Singapore scientists have created new software that may beef up future surveillance efforts by distinguishing between people's normal activities and suspicious behavior. The software, created by researchers at the Nanyang Technological University, can tell the difference between people walking, talking and acting normally, and abnormal behavior such as a fight or someone collapsing. The Singapore team recorded and classified 73 features of human movement, such as speed, direction, shape and pattern. The features were then used with existing "neural network" software, which can learn and remember patterns, to create a new program.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Will technology spawn cell phone backlash?
Image Sensing Systems was quietly going about its business making roadway traffic-management devices about two months ago when the king of Jordan called to complain about cell phones ringing in mosques while he prayed. King Abdullah was beside himself. He knew someone at the Minnesota-based company and called to suggest creating a product that could block cell phones from ringing. Within two weeks, the company had a working prototype for King Abdullah. Word got out about its product. This week, Image Sensing Systems said it had taken orders to ship about 5,000 of these devices to customers around the world.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Start-up to help profile Web surfers
A start-up wants to help Web publishers rake in more advertising revenue. Dave Morgan, the founder and one-time chief executive of Real Media, on Friday launched True Audience, a software company intended to help Web publishers boost advertising income by providing software that interprets audience traffic, the company said in a statement. Online ad revenue has plummeted across a host of Internet-based media companies, which have been scrambling to find ways to measure their audiences and to track the effectiveness of ads. The New York-based start-up builds technology that retrieves and aggregates audience data such as age, gender and ZIP code from various publishing applications that offer content, ads, e-mail, site registration and subscriptions. Web publishers can use that information to construct individual profiles of site visitors and thus identify specific segments of their audience for prospective advertisers.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

IBM lab simulates home of the future
Refrigerators that offer spoiled-milk alerts. Porch lights that home owners can turn off when they're away on vacation. Bathroom counters that announce whether it's safe to mix two medications. Such a future is now on display at an IBM lab in Austin, Texas, where researchers are testing new technology in a fully furnished living room, kitchen and garage. In the kitchen, a screen on the refrigerator door tells what's inside. Digital stoves and microwaves cook automatically, following recipes downloaded from the Internet. In the living room, a miniature, mobile wireless touch-screen replaces remote controls. Servers are built into the decor, allowing wireless devices, appliances, thermostats, security systems and computers to communicate with one another from anywhere.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Xbox's "Shrek" steals Microsoft show
It may not be the key to boosting profits at the world's largest software company, but a flatulent green ogre stole the limelight at Microsoft's annual pitch to Wall Street analysts. After hours of detailed presentations Thursday concerning Microsoft's lineup of upcoming software, the 350 analysts there were treated to new video games that will run on the company's highly anticipated Xbox console. In the first public showing of one exclusive Xbox title, Microsoft games chief Seamus Blackley played "Shrek," a game based on the hit animated movie from DreamWorks. Startling the audience, Blackley showed how players controlling the grumpy green ogre would accomplish missions by stunning their enemies with flatulence. By eating spicy peppers, Shrek can also emit fiery belches, which when combined with the flatulence can produce a gastrointestinal weapon of considerable power, Blackley said.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on... oh yeah... I just can't get a life