The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

MS warns of "critical" Java VM flaws
Microsoft released an advisory Wednesday night warning all users of its Windows operating system of two new critical flaws that could allow a malicious attacker to take control of a victim's PC. The critical flaws occur in the software giant's implementation of the Java Virtual Machine, which allows platform-independent programs to run on a PC. "(The flaws) could enable an attacker to gain complete control over a user’s system," stated the advisory. "This would enable the attacker to perform any operation that the user could, such as running applications; communicating with web sites; (and) adding, deleting or changing data."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-958547.html

Group: MS update violates settlement
A computer-industry trade group took a shot at Microsoft's credibility Wednesday, alleging that the recently released Windows XP Service Pack 1 violates the software giant's pending antitrust settlement. In a 12-page letter sent to Assistant Attorney General Charles James and to Elliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general, ProComp, a group partially funded by Microsoft competitors, charged the company with "at least six separate and ongoing violations" of one section of the proposed agreement. The timing of the allegation could be important for drawing additional attention to a settlement reached by Microsoft, the Justice Department and nine of 18 states in the company's more than 4-year-old antitrust case.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-958543.html

Logitech's digital pen -- the write stuff
Logitech is hoping its new Io digital pen will make the PC mightier, and easier to use, than the sword. About the size of a standard ballpoint, the Io captures and stores a digital version of a person's handwritten notes. These can then be downloaded, still in handwritten form, to a computer. Logitech unveiled the gadget on Wednesday at this week's DemoMobile conference. The pen is equipped with an optical sensor that captures the notes a person writes on a special pad of paper. The Io can store up to 40 pages of handwritten notes in its internal memory, using an image file format. These files are then transferred to a PC via a USB (universal serial bus) connection located in the Io's ink well-like cradle. The notes can then be added to documents or attached to e-mails.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-958501.html

Designing the century's first digital city
The closest most people get to designing a metropolis from scratch is by playing SimCity. But New York University academic Anthony Townsend is getting a crack at the real thing some 6,800 miles from home. Townsend, a research scientist at NYU's Taub Urban Research Center, has received a commission from the South Korean government to turn an undeveloped parcel of land on the outskirts of Seoul into a city whose raison d'etre will be to produce and consume products and services based on new digital technologies. A monumental task, but one for which Townsend is well-prepared. With a grant that NYU received from the National Science Foundation, Townsend has studied the effects of information systems on cities, their design, and how new technologies are changing the face of urban interaction.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-958597.html

Cybersecurity plan lacks muscle
After Sept. 11, 2001, cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke crisscrossed the country berating technology companies for failing to do enough to shore up the Net against potential terrorist attacks. In unveiling a highly anticipated White House cybersecurity proposal on Wednesday, however, Clarke left his firebrand at home. Rather than target specific industry segments and require that they secure themselves by recommending tough new laws and regulations, the administration's plan recommends that industry and individuals simply take greater care. "It has no teeth," said Steven Kirschbaum, CEO of Secure Information Systems, a small Fremont, Calif.-based security consulting firm.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-958545.html?tag=fd_lede

Toshiba makes wireless play for TV
Electronics giant Toshiba announced plans Thursday to bring wireless networking to home entertainment. The company has set a November launch date for its new chips to be embedded into devices such as televisions, stereos and DVDs -- as well as laptops and modems -- and allow them to exchange information wirelessly, said Andrew Burt, Toshiba's wireless marketing director. The chips are based on the 802.11a standard, which lets equipment create a 300-foot-radius zone of Internet access with data-transfer speeds of about 54mbps. Toshiba is the latest electronic device maker hoping to latch onto the wireless networking trend that's helped push products off store shelves and into millions of homes, offices and shops.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-958694.html?tag=fd_top

Open-source group gets Sun security gift
Sun Microsystems has donated new cryptography technology to an open-source project at the heart of many secure transactions on the Internet. Sun's "elliptic curve" technology is involved in the process of using keys to encrypt and decrypt information for electronic transactions. Such encryption lets people buy products online, for example, while shielding their credit card number from prying eyes. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based server seller donated the technology to the OpenSSL project, a programming group that makes an open-source version of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption system. Elliptic curve cryptography will enable secure communications with devices that don't have as much calculating power as most desktop computers, said Whitfield Diffie, Sun's chief security officer and a pioneer of the Diffie-Hellman "public key" cryptography method used today in SSL and other encryption systems. Diffie spoke Thursday during a news conference at the SunNetwork conference here.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-958679.html?tag=fd_top

Online gaming makes room for Hulk
The bustling online-gaming universe is set to get even more crowded, as the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man try to muscle in on the action. Media conglomerate Vivendi Universal announced an agreement Thursday with Marvel Enterprises to create a massive multiplayer online game based on Marvel comics characters. Vivendi said in a statement that it expects to have the game ready by 2005. The Hulk and the X-Men will have to fight for attention in an increasingly crowded market. Almost every major game publisher is planning huge virtual universes they hope will draw new customers into the small but lucrative online-gaming market, currently dominated by fantasy games such as "EverQuest."
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-958650.html?tag=fd_top

Lawmaker pushes for digital TV deadline
Television broadcasters would be required to switch entirely to digital, copy-protected signals by January 2006, under a proposal released Thursday by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin. Standard televisions and VCRs would become obsolete by that date as the new, high-definition signals could only be picked up by digital TVs and recording devices with built-in anti-piracy features, according to Tauzin's draft bill. Tauzin's proposal seeks to light a fire under broadcasters, consumer-electronics makers and media companies who have so far failed to reach agreement over how to switch from analog to digital broadcasts. In a statement, the Louisiana Republican said the lack of progress meant that government might have to step in.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-958685.html?tag=fd_top

A cybersage speaks his mind
For a law professor specializing in the Internet, David Sorkin takes a pretty dim view of cyberlaw. An associate professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Sorkin in 1995 was one of the first academics to offer a course on cyberlaw. But when it comes to legislating our way to Internet nirvana, Sorkin remains a skeptic. In fact, he says the law governing the offline world is equipped to handle most online disputes, and cautions that attempts to address Internet problems such as spam are only going to make matters worse. While most legal academic careers hinge on legal publications far removed from a lay readership, Sorkin has devoted a considerable fraction of his publishing energies to the Web. His Spam Laws site is routinely cited as one of the most thorough online sources for up-to-date information on the subject.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-958576.html?tag=fd_nc_1
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig.html

Wireless hitchhikers branded as thieves
Phone maker Nokia has come down strongly against warchalking. It has condemned as theft the placing of chalk symbols on walls and pavements at places where people can use wireless net access. An advisory issued by the handset maker said anyone using bandwidth without the permission of the person paying for it was simply stealing. The criticism follows a warning by the FBI about the potential dangers of warchalking. The idea for warchalking first started circulating on the internet in July it has become something of a geek hobby. The website set up to support the growing community of warchalkers hosts details of places that have been warchalked and advice to people who want to chalk their own networks.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2268224.stm

Watchdogs launch attack on filter law
Free speech proponents are stepping up their fight against Internet filtering in schools, waging a grassroots campaign against a law that requires Web blocking as a condition of federal funding. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are asking people to send letters to their public school board members and congressional representatives, urging them to fight the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Libraries have already seen portions of CIPA that require them to block Web material struck down by a special panel of federal and appellate judges. But schools -- which must still implement filters or lose federal funds -- are just beginning to grapple with the consequences of inconsistent and controversial filtering software.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-958518.html?tag=cd_mh

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Diamonds
You can do a lot of neat things with dead people after they've been baked at 1,700 degrees for a couple of hours and reduced to a pile of bone fragments. Why settle for a boring old casket-in-a-hole burial when you can turn them into diamond rings or blast them into deep space? The rise in innovative ways to use cremated remains -- "cremains" in industry jargon -- has mirrored the increasing popularity of cremation in the United States. According to the Cremation Association of North America, 25 percent of Americans are currently cremated when they die. The group expects that percentage to double by 2050. "As more cremations take place, people think of more ways to dispose of them in meaningful ways," said Ron Troyer, the spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55231,00.html

A Week for Cancer Breakthroughs
Using a new technique called "adoptive transfer," National Cancer Institute researchers significantly reduced melanoma tumors in 10 patients. The researchers took immune cells from the patients and, in essence, seasoned them to react to their own tumors. They took a small fragment of each patient's melanoma tumor and put it in a dish with the T cells, which, when reintroduced into the patients, attacked their tumors. In the study, published in the Sept. 20 issue of Science, tumors shrunk by 50 percent in six of the patients, and they had no new tumor growth. In four other patients, some tumors disappeared altogether. Previous attempts at this type of treatment were unsuccessful because the immune cells generated in the lab died too quickly.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55273,00.html

A Gathering of Big Crypto Brains
In a lush country hotel 20 miles south of Dublin, the barroom conversation turns to steganography and database vulnerabilities, encryption algorithms and biometric scanners, SWAP files and cookie poisoning. Not your average pub denizens, the speakers are some of the best-known names in cryptography and security, gathered for one of the industry's best-kept secrets: the annual COSAC conference, held every fall in Ireland. For nine years, the low-profile, high-caliber event has drawn the cream of the crypto crowd, people like Sun engineer and public key cryptography inventor Whitfield Diffie and Michael Wiener, the man who broke the once widely used encryption algorithm known as Data Encryption Standard (DES).
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55209,00.html

Can Bon Jovi Foil the Pirates?
Hair-rock mastodons Bon Jovi may have actually done something cool this decade. The 1980s megastars have a new, Web-based scheme to discourage their soon-to-be-released disc from being pirated. And computer security experts think the program just might work. On the inside of the packaging of Bon Jovi's Bounce is a 13-digit, randomly generated serial number. By entering that code on the group's website, fans enroll in a program that puts them "first in line" for concert tickets and allows them to listen to unreleased tracks from the band. "The idea is to make anyone who's file sharing or burning feel like they're missing out by not buying a real copy of the CD," said Larry Mattera, a new-media executive at Island Def Jam, Bon Jovi's label.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55246,00.html

Antimatter is mass-produced
Physicists have mass produced antimatter, a crucial first step towards precision studies of its properties that may help solve one of the greatest mysteries of the Universe. Antihydrogen has been made before, but only a few atoms at a time. Now, the Cern particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, has produced more than 50,000. Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter and both should have been created in equal quantities at the birth of the Universe. That everything around is predominantly ordinary matter is therefore a major puzzle. Cern is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2266503.stm

Signs of Water in a Planet Orbiting Another Star
A team of Italian astronomers, using a radio telescope, say they've found tantalizing signs of water in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet. If true, the finding would be of the landmark variety, other experts said. But they agreed the findings need to be verified by further work. "This would be a historic discovery -- the first detection of a prebiotic molecule in an extrasolar planet," says team leader Cristiano Cosmovici of the Institute for Cosmic and Planetary Sciences in Rome. The comments and the apparent discovery were reported by New Scientist magazine. Cosmovici presented the research this week at an astrobiology conference in Austria. The researchers looked for microwaves that water in a planet's atmosphere would emit when bathed in its host star's infrared light. They found signs from three presumed planets (the planets have not actually been photographed but were detected indirectly by other scientists).
http://www.space.com/news/astronotes-1.html

Intel unfurls experimental 3D transistors
Transistors, the building blocks of microprocessors, may have only one place to go in the future according to Intel researchers: up. At a presentation in Japan this week, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker plans to unveil more technical details behind its Tri-Gate transistor, an experimental circuit that could become a crucial element in the company's efforts to continue to follow Moore's Law by making smaller and faster chips. As the name suggests, Tri-Gate transistors differ from current technology in that they have three gates rather than one, said Gerald Marcyk, director of components research at Intel. As a result, they behave more like three-dimensional objects. Transistor gates essentially control the flow of electrons between two structures inside a transistor called the source and the drain. Letting electrons pass, or impeding their movement, creates the ones and zeros that are essential to computing.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...ies/958149.htm

We've heard hypersonic sound. It could change everything
It's the most promising audio advance in years, and it's coming this fall: Hypersonic speakers, from American Technology (headed by the irrepressible Woody Norris, whose radical personal flying machine appeared on our August cover), focus sound in a tight beam, much like a laser focuses light. The technology was first demonstrated to Popular Science five years ago, but high levels of distortion and low volume kept it in R&D labs. When it rolls out in Coke machines and other products over the next few months, audio quality will rival that of compact discs. The applications are many, from targeted advertising to virtual rear-channel speakers. The key is frequency: The ultrasonic speakers create sound at more than 20,000 cycles per second, a rate high enough to keep in a focused beam and beyond the range of human hearing. As the waves disperse, properties of the air cause them to break into three additional frequencies, one of which you can hear. This sonic frequency gets trapped within the other three, so it stays within the ultrasonic cone to create directional audio.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science...351353,00.html

Altnet to begin charging - Anybody remember BDE?
Altnet today began testing its new micro-payment system, which uses technologies from AllCharge, Newgenpay, DuoCash and other key technology providers to give file-sharers a secure and convenient method to pay for digital content on a "pay for download" basis, or by monthly subscription, for select files that they download using the Kazaa Media Desktop program. "We firmly believe that peer-to-peer file-sharing users will pay for reasonably priced, secure content on demand if it is conveniently aggregated in a single search engine and transacted via a single user interface and payment gateway. We think users will pay for content that is of a higher standard, is properly labeled, gets delivered reliably, is secure, and includes incentives for purchase," said Altnet CEO Kevin Bermeister.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../09192002a.php

More news later on

[MagicMorpheus]

Thanks, walktalker.

Originally posted by walktalker
Can Bon Jovi Foil the Pirates?
Hair-rock mastodons Bon Jovi may have actually done something cool this decade. The 1980s megastars have a new, Web-based scheme to discourage their soon-to-be-released disc from being pirated. And computer security experts think the program just might work. On the inside of the packaging of Bon Jovi's Bounce is a 13-digit, randomly generated serial number. By entering that code on the group's website, fans enroll in a program that puts them "first in line" for concert tickets and allows them to listen to unreleased tracks from the band. "The idea is to make anyone who's file sharing or burning feel like they're missing out by not buying a real copy of the CD," said Larry Mattera, a new-media executive at Island Def Jam, Bon Jovi's label.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55246,00.html

That would actually be pretty cool for hardcore fans. But for people like me, it doesn't mean much.

[theknife]

Originally posted by MagicMorpheus
Thanks, walktalker.

That would actually be pretty cool for hardcore fans. But for people like me, it doesn't mean much.

Not much at all...the hardcore fan gets the code to get the extras and then puts the cd online anyway. But, it does begin to create the business model that creates a value-added product rather than one that squeezes every cent of profit out of the sale of the disc.

[MagicMorpheus]

Originally posted by theknife


Not much at all...the hardcore fan gets the code to get the extras and then puts the cd online anyway. But, it does begin to create the business model that creates a value-added product rather than one that squeezes every cent of profit out of the sale of the disc.

True, true.