The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Microsoft reveals more Windows code
Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed technical information vital to allowing third-party developers to create software that works well with Windows. The Redmond, Wash.-based company released the information as part of its pending settlement with the Justice Department and nine of 18 states. The settling parties are waiting for a federal judge to either approve or reject the November agreement. The software titan posted the information on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site one day ahead of the information's scheduled Wednesday release.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-955655.html

RIAA site comes under second attack
For the second time in a month, the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Web site was attacked Wednesday, apparently by opponents of the industry group's efforts to shut down online music trading. By midday Wednesday, the trade group's site was unreachable. Earlier in the day, it had been modified to contain pro-file trading messages, and even direct links to downloadable music and to file-swapping service Kazaa. "RIAA willing to try alternative approach to music-sharing services," the defaced site's top headline temporarily read, according to one screen shot provided by a visitor to the site. Other links included "Piracy can be beneficial to the music industry," and "Where can I find information on giant monkeys."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-955776.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54812,00.html

Netscape's share continues to shrink
Netscape browsers have continued to lose market share at a steady clip, falling to a new low of 3.4 percent as of this week, according to new figures. A twice-yearly survey from StatMarket, a division of analyst WebSideStory, showed that despite recent technological advances AOL Time Warner's Netscape browsers, which use technology from the open-source Mozilla project, have ceded more ground to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. A year ago, Netscape's market share stood at 13 percent, but fell steeply to 7 percent by March, as IE 6 gained popularity. IE has now reached 96 percent market penetration, according to StatMarket, up from 87 percent a year ago. Mozilla gained some market share when it finally reached a 1.0 release earlier this year, but browsers such as Mozilla and Opera still only accounted for less than 1 percent of the market, StatMarket said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-955718.html

Network lessons from Ground Zero
As architects submit proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center, teams of engineers are working deep below the streets of Manhattan to construct a project of their own--one designed to keep the city connected to the rest of the world if disaster strikes again. In a subterranean labyrinth of aging pipes and bundled wires stretching for miles in every direction, these engineers are trying to make this city's densely packed communications networks less susceptible to the kind of widespread outages caused by the Sept. 11 attacks. What they have found, however, is something many had feared all along: New York's concentration of key network interchanges in one place makes its communications exponentially more vulnerable, yet they have no choice but to continue working with it.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-955703.html

CD's now protected against felt-tips
Midbar, the Israel-based company that makes copy-protection technology for audio CDs, said on Monday that its products are now to be found in more than 30 million CDs worldwide, with 10 million of those in Japan. Separately, the company said it has fixed a glitch that allowed consumers to circumvent its copy protection using a felt-tip pen. Midbar makes the Cactus Data Shield (CDS) line of copy-protection technologies, which scrambles CD data in such a way that it can be played on an audio player, but can't be copied by a PC. Copy-protection schemes such as CDS and Key2Audio are highly controversial, however, with some protected CDs having been found to cause glitches in some ordinary CD players, and to cause some computers -- particularly Macintoshes -- to crash.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-955771.html

Humor site SatireWire bows out
Humorist Andrew Marlatt spun his last tale for SatireWire.com on Wednesday, but this one was a true account of the site's end. The nearly 3-year-old Web site, which is devoted to poking fun at anything in the media, will stop dishing out stories as of this week, but will remain as an archive, according to a note posted on the site by Marlatt. Marlatt went on to say that while the site was successful, with more than 1 million visitors per month, it became a chore to produce and handle the business side. The closure runs in contrast to a tide of dot-coms that have shuttered because of the Internet rupture. Other humor sites such as The Onion have managed to hang on during the bust. The Onion draws about 1.3 million visitors a week and sustains a profitable business from advertising and merchandise sales, according to the company's president.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955803.html?tag=fd_top

Philips' Palm app woos couch potatoes
Philips introduced software Wednesday that lets handhelds running the Palm operating system remotely control household devices such as televisions, video recorders and CD players. Called ProntoLite, after Philips' Pronto universal remote control, the $19.95 software lets a Palm OS-based personal digital assistant control up to 10 different consumer-electronics devices. The maximum operating distance depends on the infrared ports of the handheld and the device, but the typical distance is 10 feet to 13 feet, according to Philips. The electronics maker and Palm are working on an extension module to expand the reach of infrared ports on PDAs. A free 15-day evaluation copy of the software is available on the Philips Pronto Web site.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-955754.html?tag=fd_top

Verizon's copyright campaign
The copyright wars on Capitol Hill have begun to drift into the political equivalent of trench warfare, with Hollywood and the music industry pitted against hardware makers, electronics manufacturers, and ragtag activists at nonprofit groups. Now consumers have a powerful new ally. Verizon and other telecommunications giants have ordered their phalanx of lobbyists to oppose the entertainment industry's demands for new copyright laws. The company is also fighting the Recording Industry Association of America's request for information about a subscriber. So at the center of the copyright scrum, you'll find Sarah Deutsch. The 41-year-old Deutsch, a vice president and associate general counsel at Verizon, represented her employer during the negotiations over the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) copyright treaties and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-955417.html

Microsoft's Newest Challenger: Moore's Law
In these recessionary times, holding the line on costs is foremost in most executives' minds. Thankfully, in the technology world -- unlike, say, real estate -- Moore's Law and its corollaries keep innovation chugging along and prices continually on the decline, thereby lowering costs for us consumers. Case in point: You can buy a low-end computer today for $400, when five years ago it would run you at least $2000. This has some PC manufacturers jumping into a different market altogether: the low cost corporate computer. IDC reports that sales of "white boxes," or generic low-cost PCs -- equipped with less than state-of-the-art components and processors -- now make up roughly 30 percent of the overall PC market. Companies such as Microtel have been selling white boxes for years, but last week Dell announced that it, too, would begin selling two lines of ultra-cheap PCs.
http://www.business2.com/articles/we...,43153,00.html

US Army tests portable translator
US soldiers on peacekeeping duties in the future could find that a portable translation device will be an essential part of their equipment. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a prototype of a speech translator that was road-tested by US Army chaplains in Croatia. "This project shows how a relatively simple speech-to-speech translation system can be rapidly and successfully constructed using today's tools," said the team from Carnegie Mellon University in a research paper published recently. The research was commissioned by the US Army, which is increasingly finding itself in peace-keeping roles where communication is key.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2219079.stm

Microsoft puts privacy policy on display
Microsoft has begun to incorporate new privacy policies and procedures in upcoming products, apparently in response to this month's settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. The newest beta, or test, version of Windows Media Player 9 Series prominently displays Microsoft's privacy policy for the program and offers consumers options for controlling just how much information they share when using the product. Unlike competing products, Windows Media Player 9 Series presents consumers with these options the first time the program is used. Microsoft is scheduled to release a widely available public beta of the media player Sept. 4 in Los Angeles.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955514.html

Apple draws on DMCA to bar external DVD burning
Apple Computer has invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent its customers from burning DVDs on external drives. Earlier this month, the company's lawyers sent a stiff warning to an Apple dealer, warning that a patch to Apple's iDVD burning software ran afoul of the controversial 1998 copyright law. "They alleged it violated Apple's intellectual property and the DMCA act," said Larry O'Connor, president of Other World Computing, a Macintosh dealer. O'Connor says his company values its close relationship with Apple -- it's been a dealer since 1988--and backed down immediately. At issue in the legal threat is Apple's well-received iDVD application, which permits users to burn DVDs only on internal drives manufactured by Apple. In unmodified form, it does not permit writing to external drives manufactured by third parties.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955805.html?tag=cd_mh

Mozilla 1.1 debuts to mixed reviews
The Mozilla.org open-source project introduced the latest version of its Web browser this week, aimed at improving speed and performance, but the software still has a ways to go, some consumers say. The group, sponsored by AOL Time Warner-owned Netscape Communications, launched Mozilla 1.1, free Web browser software that is the product of collaborative efforts of open-source developers. The latest full release makes improvements to the browser's stability, Web site compatibility, and standards support. The software's introduction comes only months after the debut of Mozilla 1.0, the group’s first completed browser, which was in the works for several years. Netscape spun off the Mozilla open-source project in 1998 to give Web developers a toolkit for creating new browsing features that might appear in coming iterations of Netscape's proprietary engine. The Mozilla technology has also been used as the foundation for other open-source browsers, such as Linux-based Galeon from the open-source development project GNOME.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955617.html?tag=cd_mh

Will Canada's ISPs become spies?
The Canadian government is considering a proposal that would force Internet providers to rewire their networks for easy surveillance by police and spy agencies. A discussion draft released Sunday also contemplates creating a national database of every Canadian with an Internet account, a plan that could sharply curtail the right to be anonymous online. The Canadian government, including the Department of Justice and Industry Canada, wrote the 21-page blueprint as a near-final step in a process that seeks to give law enforcement agents more authority to conduct electronic surveillance. A proposed law based on the discussion draft is expected to be introduced in Parliament late this year or in early 2003.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955595.html?tag=cd_mh

America's Might: A Comic Tale
If some of the U.S. Army's futuristic weapons programs seem like they're straight out of a comic book, there's a good reason, according to funny book creators Ray and Ben Lai. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Lais allege, used an image from their comic, Radix, in a grant proposal without their permission. That image helped the college gain a five-year, $50-million grant to develop the next generation of soldiers' battlefield armor. MIT professors claim the gear would let grunts leap 20-foot walls, become nearly invisible on command, deflect bullets, heal their wounds quickly, protect against chemical and biological agents -- and strike fear into the hearts of evildoers everywhere.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54815,00.html

Down by the Diploma Mills Stream
Welcome to Harrington University (also known as the University of San Moritz, University of Palmers Green and University of Devonshire, among others), where anyone can purchase a bachelor's or master's degree -- no tests or coursework required -- for the bargain price of several thousand dollars. The "university," owned by an American resident in Romania, uses mail-drop addresses in the United Kingdom, printing services in Jerusalem and banking options in Cyprus. The operation has sold 70,000 diplomas in the United States alone, raking in over $100 million, according to diploma mill expert John Bear.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54596,00.html

Lamo Bumped from NBC After Hacking Them
How did a mediagenic hacker like Adrian Lamo get himself bumped last week from a scheduled appearance on the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw? Perhaps with his impromptu on-camera intrusion into the peacock network's own computers. The vagabond hacker known for his drifter lifestyle and his public forays into large and poorly-secured corporate intranets sat down at a Washington D.C. Kinko's laptop station earlier this month with a freelance NBC news producer to show-off his particular style of hacking -- the 21-year-old typically uses little more than an ordinary browser, possessing an eerie knack for finding undocumented Web servers and open proxies at large organizations.
http://online.securityfocus.com/news/595

Jedi 'religion' grows in Australia
More than 70,000 people in Australia have declared that they are followers of the Jedi faith, the religion created by the Star Wars films. A recent census found that one in 270 respondents - or 0.37% of the population - say they believe in "the force", an energy field that gives Jedi Knights like Luke Skywalker their power in the films. Most of the 70,509 people who wrote Jedi on their census forms were suspected to have done so in response to an e-mail encouraging all Star Wars fans to get it recognised as an official religion. But the majority do not seriously tell each other: "May the force be with you", according to Australian Star Wars Appreciation Society president Chris Brennan.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2218456.stm

The Pen as Mighty as the Keyboard
The Holy Grail of portable computing -- having every document you could ever need in one safe digital place -- may seem less elusive these days. In any road warrior's briefcase, you'll likely uncover a hard drive holding e-mail, presentations, a few gigs of music, even a couple of movies. But you'll probably also find a hefty amount of paper: scribbled notes on legal pads, printouts covered with highlighter marks. Is it possible to transfer this clutter to the computer? Can your handwriting be kept in hassle-free digital form? My answer, after playing with a tablet PC, is yes. Tablet PC is the generic name for about a dozen slate-and-pen-based computers, priced in the $2,000 range, that are coming out this November, timed to and blessed by Microsoft's new note-taking utility, Journal. Most include some form of keyboard, which is like a security blanket for the user.
http://www.business2.com/articles/ma...,42148,FF.html

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Hi Mr. Newsman…come a bit closer… good... there…

Originally posted by walktalker
Verizon's copyright campaign
The copyright wars on Capitol Hill have begun to drift into the political equivalent of trench warfare, with Hollywood and the music industry pitted against hardware makers, electronics manufacturers, and ragtag activists at nonprofit groups. Now consumers have a powerful new ally. Verizon and other telecommunications giants have ordered their phalanx of lobbyists to oppose the entertainment industry's demands for new copyright laws. The company is also fighting the Recording Industry Association of America's request for information about a subscriber. So at the center of the copyright scrum, you'll find Sarah Deutsch. The 41-year-old Deutsch, a vice president and associate general counsel at Verizon, represented her employer during the negotiations over the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) copyright treaties and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-955417.html

These are good news. It is only natural that ISPs (at least those not owned by the content conglomerates) side with their private clientele against heavy copyright-based control measures. They know that private p2p contributes much to the growth of their broadband subscriber base.

- tg