The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

For the news fanatics within you
Open-source fans to emulate .Net
Open-source fans announced on Monday the first steps in an effort to reproduce Microsoft's .Net's underpinnings so people can use the technology without Microsoft's involvement. As previously reported, the move could increase the importance and popularity of the .Net strategy while diminishing Microsoft's control over the software itself. With .Net, Microsoft plans to sell its services -- such as address books or e-commerce, as well as the software plumbing that powers those services -- over the Internet. The effort to duplicate .Net has two components so far: Mono and DotGNU.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093886,00.html

Messenger woes cast cloud over Hailstorm
A partial outage of Microsoft's MSN Messenger service, now in its seventh day, is casting a shadow over a wide-ranging services strategy that Microsoft hopes will be its future. Not only has Microsoft been struggling to restore full service, but on Thursday the company also shut down MSN Messenger as it restarted the network of servers that handle messaging traffic. That "reboot" failed to immediately fix the problem. The outage, which began Tuesday, affects as many as 10 million people, or roughly one-third of MSN Messenger users. Initially, many people simply lost buddy lists of friends, but as Microsoft tackled the problem more aggressively, service collapsed completely for many of those users. MSN Messenger customers continued to report service problems Monday.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093851,00.html

U.S. military backs open-source security
Continuing its support of open-source operating systems, the U.S. Department of Defense granted $1.2 million to a community project aimed at adding advanced security features to FreeBSD, an open-source variant of Unix. NAI Labs, the advanced research group of security-software maker Network Associates, announced the grant Monday. The group administers the funded Community-Based Open-Source Security, or CBOSS, project. Security can be seen as an investment and a form of insurance," said Robert Watson, FreeBSD Core Team member and a research scientist at NAI Labs. "We're taking a multipronged approach to address a number of parts of the security problem: Some have to do with an immediate short-term payoff, but many of them have to do with exploring how to make FreeBSD a better platform for new security work so as to facilitate future research."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093868,00.html

Antitrust: Is Microsoft ready to deal?
If the government and Microsoft can't hammer out a settlement soon, a new U.S. District Court judge will be assigned to the antitrust case next month and charged with proposing remedies. The operative word is "if." To hear Bill Gates tell it, Microsoft is eager to settle. Immediately after the split decision on the case June 28, Gates said the company will work to resolve the case "without continued need for litigation." Settlement talks failed before, but the times have changed now that a federal appeals court rejected the trial court's breakup order.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...783145,00.html

Microsoft stumbles with XP preview
As if Microsoft didn't have enough services trouble this week with the MSN Messenger outage, the company stumbled in its delivery of a preview version of Windows XP to more than 100,000 testers. Microsoft unveiled the Windows XP Preview Program on July 2, issuing the first of two final testing versions--or release candidates -- to those willing to pay to get it. But eight days later, many of the people who plunked down $10 for the right to download the approximately 500MB file said they have not received the e-mail containing a user ID and password that would allow them to do so. Microsoft also delivered the wrong passwords to some people, while a server glitch allowed others to download the preview for free, the company said.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Netscape ruling bolsters privacy efforts
People who downloaded Netscape Communications' SmartDownload software are not bound by an online contract because they did not specifically agree to it, a federal judge has ruled. The decision, which touches on the validity of commonly used Web contracts known as click-wrap licenses, clears the way for the plaintiffs to sue Netscape for tinkering with their computers without their consent. In a ruling last week, New York federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein said the plaintiffs do not have to go through arbitration to solve the dispute--as required by the online agreement--because Netscape never required SmartDownload users to indicate their consent.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Storage Devices Could Get a Whole Lot Cooler
Floppy discs, CD-ROMs, DVDs -- it seems that every time a better way to store your data comes along, you just get more data to fill up all the extra space. And now that people are increasingly looking for places to keep their digital music downloads -- and maybe soon their digital movies -- it's not hard to imagine that even the mighty DVD will one day join the floppy on the scrap heap of storage devices. While current data storage technology continues to advance, optical storage solutions (like DVDs) and their magnetic storage counterparts (like computer hard drives) share the same limitation. . As Hans Coufal, head of the holographic data storage project at IBM's Almaden Research Center, points out in his German accent: “It is only natural that we explore the third dimension.” Storing data in three dimensions instead of two would increase the capacity of a storage system exponentially.
http://www.ecompany.com/articles/web...,12589,00.html

Medical journals to fill health void online
The World Health Organization (WHO) and six publishing companies said Monday that they would provide the latest biomedical research via the Internet to thousands of scientists and researchers in the developing world. Almost 1,000 leading medical and scientific journals and eventually textbooks will be available online for free or at reduced prices to medical schools and research institutions in nearly 100 countries. "The initiative is tremendously important and exciting," Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general of the WHO, told a news conference in London. "It will enable many thousands of doctors, health workers and researchers to access information that is very important."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Music stores wary of labels' rise online
One of the most intense battles for the soul of the online music business may not involve Internet companies. As the big record labels move toward offering online music-subscription services, tension is increasing in their relationships with powerful retail giants. Stores such as Tower Records, Wherehouse Music and Best Buy are fearful of being cut off from the consumer as people listen to music via Yahoo, RealNetworks or America Online. The retailers, which maintain an influential lobbying presence in Washington, are making their dissatisfaction known in public and -- for the labels -- potentially uncomfortable ways. They're even raising the specter of antitrust concerns in the context of the planned subscription services jointly owned by the major music companies.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

RealNetworks puts price on "Big Brother"
CBS Television has partnered with RealNetworks to charge admission fees for Internet video streams of its voyeuristic TV series, "Big Brother 2," a further sign of content owners attempting to charge for online programming. Streaming media company RealNetworks plans to offer live video of the reality TV show through its Gold Pass subscription service, which launched last August, for $9.95 per month. CBS will sell standalone access for $19.95 to behind-the-scenes footage of the entire show, which runs for 12 weeks. A notice on the CBS Web site says that live, unedited video from the show, which debuted in its second season Thursday night, is available online free throughout the weekend.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

GPS network to monitor Earth's creep
It took a decade, but the last of 250 global positioning system (GPS) monitoring stations was installed this week, allowing scientists to record with unprecedented precision the minute movements of the Earth associated with earthquakes. Unlike traditional networks of seismometers, which record ground shaking, the GPS units will track the subtle creep of the Earth's crust as strain builds on faults -- only to be released later as quakes. Standing on spindly legs and painted a dull gray, the stations pepper a wide swath of Southern California and the Baja California peninsula in Mexico. Seismologists began building the Southern California Integrated GPS Network, or SCIGN, a decade ago; the 250th station was installed this week.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on... I'm hungry... gotta eat something