The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Aren't newsman supposed to be restless, TG ?

Software firms big around the middle
Competition among software shops that sell to midsized businesses is heating up, and the temperature promises to continue rising as big companies look down-market for new customers and little ones look up-market in search of growth and profitability. Caught in the cross fire are companies such as Onyx Software and Pivotal, which sell customer relationship management (CRM) software that helps medium-sized companies manage sales and customer service. As the segment gets squeezed from above and below, Gartner research director Joe Outlaw said some software shops won't make the cut. "We expect 25 (percent) to 30 percent consolidation in the midsized CRM market in the next couple of years. People will get merged out, pushed out, moved into some vertical niches," he said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-957537.html

Searchers strike back at China ban
AltaVista has hit out against the ban imposed upon its service by the Chinese government. Since the weekend, surfers in China have been unable to access AltaVista. Instead they have been redirected to a variety of domestic search engines which have been approved by the communist government. Kevin Eyres, general manager, AltaVista International, issued a statement today which said: "Free access to information is the cornerstone of our mission to provide access to information to the global community. "We were very concerned to learn that AltaVista.com and AltaVista.co.uk were inaccessible in China. We have been working on alternative ways to serve our Chinese users, with additional URLs not in the AltaVista.com domain, including www.raging.com.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-957546.html

The Net remembers 9/11
Rob Fazio knows as well as anyone how difficult Sept. 11 will be this year. His father, Aon Re Worldwide employee Ronald Fazio, died in the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. In the months after his father's death, Fazio and Jeff Garbutt, a longtime friend and New York City Police officer who scoured the rubble for victims' remains, constructed a Web site to help deal with their grief. The Hold the Door Open for Others project, which provides information about coping with a loved one's death, not only aided the healing of its operators but also provided a resource for other victims' families.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-957410.html

"Buggy" Sept. 11 worm surfaces
A new e-mail worm has surfaced that uses the terror attacks of Sept. 11 to lure victims, antivirus groups say. The worm has the subject line "All people" and appears to be from "main@world.com." According to antivirus company McAfee.com, the worm starts a mass mailing to all people found in Microsoft's Windows and Outlook address books. The worm is believed to have originated in Russia. But according to McAfee, the programming is buggy and it fails to work on many systems. The company classified the worm as a low-level threat. Antivirus software maker Symantec said that fewer than 50 infections had been reported as of Tuesday night.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-957493.html

Greek game ban overturned
A Greek law banning all electronic games in public has been declared unconstitutional by a court that has dismissed two separate cases against three people charged under the law. The decision by the Thessaloniki court could eventually see the law repealed, according to reports. Prior to Tuesday's decision, computer game players and Internet cafes owners in Greece said they would fight against the law. According to the law's opponents, it was conceived to address illicit gambling but was written so broadly that playing any electronic game could be considered illegal.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-957487.html

Customers blame spam on filched lists
E-mail management company Lyris Technologies on Wednesday said it is investigating spam complaints that may involve hundreds of thousands of compromised customer e-mail addresses. At least three current and former Lyris customers this week complained that recipients of their e-mail newsletters have been receiving spam. MarketingSherpa.com, a publisher of online marketing newsletters, suspects that all eight of its mailing lists have been compromised, said Anne Holland, the company's founder. More than 20 other publishers, who combined have more than 2 million e-mail addresses on their lists, have also contacted Holland saying their Lyris-hosted lists have been compromised.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-957567.html?tag=fd_top

Intel gadget wirelessly joins PCs, TVs
A new device from Intel could speed the dream of the networked home, where PC-stored digital photos would be viewed on a TV, and MP3 music tracks could be beamed to a stereo. Similar in size to a small set-top box, the "digital media adapter," announced this week, connects to a home-entertainment appliance, such as a television, using a standard audio/video cable. It contains the necessary communications technology, including Intel's XScale PXA processors, to let the appliance wirelessly access files stored on a computer. PC makers Dell Computer, Gateway and China's Legend were demonstrating prototypes of the adapters at the Intel Developer Forum this week in San Jose, Calif. The companies are planning to bundle the adapters with future PCs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-957554.html?tag=fd_top

Digital media responses to September 11 are a mixed bag
We all have our stories about how we heard about the plane crashes and building collapses on Sept. 11. Chances are, they involve one or more plugged-in media appliances. The news entered my life through my LED clock radio with an early-morning report on NPR that sounded like a bad dream. When I realized it wasn't, I snapped out of bed and clicked on the TV (digital cable) to see the visual proof. When I'd seen the spectacular but horrific footage of explosions four or five times, I frantically called East Coast friends on my cell phone, and later I got on my computer to e-mail those I couldn't reach, convinced that life would never be the same again. All the information that circled around this disaster those first days was served to us in a now-ubiquitous mixture of media-delivery systems. Since then, we have continued to experience cultural responses -- analyses, world news, memorials, fund-raisers, anxieties -- mostly mediated via electronic media.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/cultural/

MP3s Are Big Music's Savior, Not Slayer
The music business is trapped in a new-economy time warp. While the rest of us plod through Scandal Summer 2002, record companies are still dealing with "paradigm shifting technologies," talk of cannibalization, and provocative research reports, circa 1999. The spate of controversial music-business research -- from GartnerG2's report on online music service Pressplay 2.0 to the usual harangue from the Recording Industry Association of America -- reached its zenith last month with Forrester Research's "Downloads Save the Music Business," which predicts that downloads will generate $2.1 billion for labels by 2007. Currently, of course, downloads generate nothing but headaches for the Big Five record companies.
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?...&doc_id=209408

Conflict against Iraq begins online
The US may not yet have gone to war with Iraq but in cyberspace the conflict has already begun. According to security firm mi2g three major attacks were launched against computer systems hosted by the AOL TimeWarner network on 8 September. A pro-Islamic hacking group dubbed USG (Unix Security Guards) was responsible. Included in the message defacing the sites was criticism of the planned Iraqi invasion. According to mi2g the group has carried out four other attacks in September and 155 since it was formed in May 2002. Among the victims was a US banking group. Another pro-Islamic hacking group, the AIC (Anti-India Crew) has carried out 454 attacks since July and a third group, the WFD (World's Fantabulous Defacers) is responsible for another 400-odd attacks since November last year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2250993.stm

Falwell parody site preaches free speech
Rev. Jerry Falwell's attempt to seize control of JerryFalwell.com should be rejected, lawyers for the parody Web site told a court in Virginia. They said in legal papers filed on Monday that a federal district judge should dismiss Falwell's claims of trademark infringements and libel and throw out the case. A central argument to the brief is that because the defendant in the case, Gary Cohn, lives in Illinois, he should not be sued in Virginia. "It's important to protect the evolving, but pretty close to established, principle throughout the country that people who express their opinions on passive noncommercial Web sites can only be sued at home," said Paul Levy, an attorney for Cohn. "Otherwise, people who don't have profits against which to balance the risks of having to spend money on a lawyer would be chilled from speaking freely." Levy works for Public Citizen, a nonprofit organization founded by Ralph Nader that has become increasingly active in free-speech cases involving the Internet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-957422.html?tag=cd_mh

Printed Web Info OK for Inmates
A U.S. District Court in San Francisco has struck down a California prison policy that bars inmates from receiving material printed from the Internet. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California sued the state on behalf of Pelican Bay prisoner Frank Clement, who claimed that the policy violated his First Amendment rights. Clement brought the case against the California Department of Corrections after he was prohibited from using an Internet pen pal service that allows inmates to post personal ads online and receive correspondence via snail mail. California prisoners don't have direct Internet access. A CDC spokesman said that the regulation was implemented after prison mailrooms were flooded with letters containing printouts of Web pages and e-mail messages. The volume of mail created a burden on prison staff screening inmate correspondence.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,55097,00.html

How Changed Laws Changed U.S.
Americans' attitudes toward the war on terrorism have changed dramatically over the past year. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, a CBS/New York Times poll found that 79 percent of Americans were willing to forfeit personal liberties to fight terrorism. But a Princeton survey in May found that only 40 percent of respondents said they trusted the government. The American Civil Liberties Union and others have attributed the fading support to the fears that legislation such as the USA Patriot Act -- which gives terrorism investigators broad surveillance powers -– will erode the constitutional freedoms of ordinary citizens. Although many of the surveillance provisions of the act expire after five years, others do not.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,55065,00.html

Unplugged U.
Dartmouth College is the definition of old school. Founded in 1769, it sits in the center of Hanover, New Hampshire, a hamlet two and a half hours northwest of Boston in the Upper Connecticut River Valley. On the east side of the seven-acre town green stands Dartmouth Hall, a three-story colonial-style building; commissioned in 1784, it has twice been destroyed by fire and rebuilt. Remote bell-tower hacking is just one of the ways the wireless network is changing life at Dartmouth. The network is subtly but profoundly altering teaching techniques, social interaction, study habits, and personal security. In spite of its remoteness, the college has long been one of the most wired places on earth, fashioning its campus into the prototype of the fully wireless, always-connected community: a microcosm that provides a peek at what our residential neighborhoods and office spaces may look like in a few years.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/dartmouth.html

Wearable PCs Hasten Pentagon Fix
Supervisors on the Pentagon's $700 million reconstruction and restoration project are using a wearable computer system to gather, store and analyze data during their daily room-by-room inspections. Developed by Lanham, Maryland, aerospace and telecommunications specialist Protolex, the prototype system is intended to improve communications between on- and offsite supervisors by creating more accurate and timelier inspection checklists, location-specific task recommendations, and real-time reports and work orders. Wearable computers are ideal for this type of mission because they are "truly mobile, fully functional devices that can be easily interfaced with numerous peripherals and sensors," said Mike Binko, Xybernaut director of communications.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54988,00.html

Dino Phone Likely Link to Tumors
In what could bolster an $800 million lawsuit against Motorola and major cell-phone carriers, a new study found a possible link between older cell phones and brain tumors. Although many studies have found no cancer risk from cell-phone use, the research said long-term users of analog phones are at least 30 percent more likely than non-users to develop brain tumors. Swedish oncologist Dr. Lennart Hardell studied 1,617 patients with brain tumors and compared them with a similar-sized group of people without tumors. He found that patients who used Sweden's Nordic Mobile telephones were 30 percent more likely to have brain tumors, especially on the side of the head that touched the phone most often. Those who used the phones longer than 10 years were 80 percent more likely to develop tumors. The lawsuit names Motorola (MOT), Verizon (VZ) and other wireless carriers.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,55077,00.html

Want Video on Demand? Press Pause
The Internet is being overrun by file-trading thieves, if you believe the entertainment industry. It's ironic, then, that movie companies are now being accused of stealing the technology that powers their online businesses. For the past three years, the music industry has claimed that file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa kept legitimate services from succeeding. Those services haven't hurt the movie industry yet, but Dallas-based USA Video could prove to be a huge pain. The company received a patent in 1992 for technology that delivers video on demand. USA Video didn't do anything with the patent immediately, waiting for technology to take off. Now that it has, the company wants video-on-demand providers -- starting with Movielink, a joint venture between five major studios -- to pony up the licensing fees.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,55026,00.html

U.S. Car Buyers Stall on Hybrids
Hybrid electric vehicles, or HEVs, are gaining popularity, but their fuel economy and environmental benefits are not yet enough to win over price-conscious buyers in the key U.S. market, industry officials said on Wednesday. HEV models from Honda and Toyota, which use both a conventional engine and an electric motor, are becoming more common in the United States and could take off soon in Europe, according to U.S. executives at a four-day European-lead battery conference in Rome. The vehicles use an internal combustion engine to recharge batteries and to provide extra power when accelerating. In the United States, HEVs cost around $4,000 more than equivalent standard models.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55078,00.html

Gene therapy could turn airways into a medicine pump
Gene therapy that converts a patient's lungs into a living, breathing medicine factory could one day eliminate regular drug doses for diabetics and haemophiliacs, new studies suggest. Gene therapy adds working genes to tissues that have defective ones. But most research has focused on supplying lung genes to sick lungs and muscle genes to ailing muscles. In a new twist, James Wilson and his team at the University of Pennsylvania have added to mice lungs a gene that encodes the protein missing from some haemophiliacs' blood. For months thereafter the animals' airways produced the protein, called factor IX, at levels that would treat human patients.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020909/020909-5.html

New space telescope plan unfolds
After a year of dithering, NASA has finally picked TRW to build its $825 million Next Generation Space Telescope, scheduled for a 2010 launch to replace the Hubble Space Telescope. The new telescope's 6.5-metre mirror is too large to be launched in one piece by an expendable rocket. TRW won the contract with a plan to assemble the mirror in space like a drop-leaf table, with a pair of two-metre 'wings' folding down around a central 2.0 by 6.5-metre segment. The competing design from Lockheed-Martin would have unfolded like a flower. The big advances over Hubble are in size and sensitivity. NASA had hoped for an eight-metre mirror, but had to settle for 6.5 metres to control costs. That mirror still will have more than seven times the area of the 2.4-metre Hubble, so it can collect much more light. It also will benefit from instruments more sensitive than those available when Hubble was built.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992777

New Speculation Over Space-Rock Moon Mystery
A handful of moons orbiting space rocks on the fringes of the solar system and discovered over the past year or so have astronomers puzzling over their presence and size. The Kuiper Belt region of the solar system, which stretches from just past Neptune to beyond the farthest reaches of Pluto's orbit, was confirmed to exist in 1992 and some 500 KBOs have since been found. Last year, the first satellite orbiting a KBO was discovered. The total such moons in the belt now stands at seven.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...lt_020911.html

Biological alternative to electronic pacemakers
Genetically-engineered heart cells may be able to replace the electronic pacemakers that hundreds of thousands of cardiac patients have transplanted each year, suggests a new study in guinea-pigs. In a healthy heart, the rhythm is orchestrated by a small group of cells called the sinoatrial (SA) node. But Eduardo Marbÿn of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland and his colleagues found that ordinary cardiac cells can generate their own beat if a single protein is knocked out by gene therapy. The researchers are now planning to repeat the experiment in pigs. "They are large enough that we can use the same off-the-shelf clinical tools and imaging machines that we would use for patients," says Marbÿn. If all goes well, clinical trials could start in less than five years, he says.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992787

Terror warning over electronic equipment
Airliners could be brought down by terrorists using modified versions of almost any personal electronic equipment, a security expert has warned. He says passengers should be barred from carrying any electronic gadgets onto aircraft until planes are able to detect them. Chet Uber, a technology expert at Security Posture in Omaha, Nebraska, says devices such as radios, tape recorders, CD players, PDAs and laptop computers could easily - and invisibly - be adapted to cause potentially catastrophic interference with an aircraft's control systems. While it has been known for some time that cellphones and laptops can cause low-level interference, no airline monitors such radio emissions during flight. Instead they rely on passengers turning off their devices during critical periods such as take-off and landing.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992780

OK more news later on