The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

Ballmer: We'll outsmart open source
Although Microsoft cannot compete against Linux on price, the company will use its community of professionals to outsmart the open-source movement, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told an audience of Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) in London on Monday. "Linux is a serious competitor," said Ballmer. "We have to compete with free software, on value, but in a smart way. We cannot price at zero, so we need to justify our posture and pricing. Linux isn't going to go away -- our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace." He acknowledged there was more to Linux than free software -- the main benefit of the open-source movement was the community developing software and sharing ideas.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-959112.html

Microsoft makes Rare buyout official
Microsoft executives on Tuesday confirmed one of the worst-kept secrets in the game industry: the company's purchase of British game developer Rare. Ed Fries, vice president of Xbox game content for the tech giant, confirmed the purchase at a Microsoft promotional event in Spain for the company's Xbox game console. The company said in a statement that it had paid $375 million for the developer, best known for creating titles such as "GoldenEye" and "DonkeyKong 64" for Japanese game giant Nintendo. Rare will now produce games exclusively for the Xbox. As previously reported, Nintendo had sold its 49 percent ownership interest in Rare and confirmed that the deal was part of Microsoft's acquisition of the studio.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-959248.html

Standards chief caught in patent storm
If you want to adhere to the latest official protocol for building a Web application, it could cost you. Welcome to the latest controversy roiling the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body responsible for shepherding Web technologies like XML and HTML. This particular controversy began brewing nearly a year ago when the W3C first contemplated a change that would let its working groups incorporate technologies that already had intellectual property claims -- and royalties -- attached to them. The W3C subsequently backed away from that stance in the face of strong opposition and reaffirmed its policy of only recommending royalty-free technologies.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-959235.html

U.S. braces for "hacktivist" threat
The U.S. government is advising system administrators to monitor their systems for computer attacks planned this week, ahead of the Washington, D.C., meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The meetings have spurred protests in previous years, but this year anti-globalization activists are expected to step up their plans, possibly attempting to block traffic on the city's streets on Friday. The U.S. government's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) said Monday that those planning physical disruption might also use computer attacks to "enhance the effects of the physical attack or to complicate the response by emergency services to the attack." Although there have been no specific cyberthreats issued against the IMF and World Bank meetings, the center warned that "several hacker groups" could be planning Internet protests.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-959118.html

Lindows opens up with Netscape
Lindows, the maker of a consumer-friendly version of the Linux operating system, announced Tuesday that it would bundle Netscape Communication's Web browsing and communication technology into its software. The start-up software maker collaborated with Netscape's corporate parent company AOL Time Warner to integrate Netscape 7.0 into LindowsOS version 2.0, which was released last week. The move teams up two companies who are perpetually engaged in separate battles against software giant Microsoft. Lindows, which is being touted as a low-cost alternative to Windows, ran into legal trouble with Microsoft over its name.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-959124.html

Hollywood charged with online movie plot
Digital on-demand movie service Intertainer Tuesday said it filed an antitrust lawsuit against three major Hollywood studios alleging conspiracy and price-fixing. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, named entertainment giants AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal and Sony as the conspirators that have been hindering Intertainer's business of offering movies-on-demand. The suit further alleges that the studios engaged in a "group boycott" of licensing their movies to Intertainer to buy time in launching their rival Movielink joint venture. "The actions taken by these leading studios will, in effect, eliminate consumer choice, produce higher prices, reduce output and lower quality services that would prevail in a competitive market," Jonathan Taplin, CEO of Intertainer, said in a statement.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-959149.html
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,55346,00.html

Privacy bill not likely this year
U.S. consumers are unlikely to see new federal privacy protections this year, but lawmakers said Tuesday that they are still hammering out compromises with an eye on the next legislative session. With a scant six weeks to go until congressional elections, lawmakers concede that neither a business-friendly bill in the House of Representatives nor a tougher bill in the Senate is likely to become law. But Congress faced renewed pressure to act as high-tech companies worry that they could face a growing patchwork of conflicting state and local regulations, while civil-liberties advocates fear that government counterterrorism investigations could further erode individual privacy rights.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959274.html?tag=fd_top

Hunt heats up for mobile's holy grail
Nokia and Ericsson said Tuesday they've each separately reached milestones for cell phone equipment that uses wideband-CDMA, the cell phone standard expected to dominate its rivals by 2005. Wideband-CDMA (w-CDMA) triples the calling capacity of any cell phone network. It also creates a wireless Web with download speeds that are seven times faster than dial-up Web services such as America Online. It's expected to dominate the world stage because any wireless carrier, regardless of the type of cell phone network it has, can upgrade to w-CDMA, which is not the case for rival cell phone standards like GPRS (General Packet Radio Service).
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-959267.html?tag=fd_top

Net archive silences Scientology critic
Buckling under pressure from the Church of Scientology, the Internet Archive has removed a church critic's Web site from its system. The Internet Archive, a site that preserves snapshots of old Web pages and bills itself as "a library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form," no longer contains links to archival pages of Xenu.net. Instead, surfers are pointed to a page telling them the site was taken down "per the request of the site owner." However, Xenu.net operator Andreas Heldal-Lund said he never made any such request. Heldal-Lund, a Norwegian businessman and longtime church critic, said he's eager for people to read archived pages of his site.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959236.html?tag=fd_top

Peter Gabriel's Windows Media 9 gig
Microsoft on Tuesday scored its first big promotional boost for the new Windows Media Player 9 Series software. Peter Gabriel's new album, "Up," debuted Tuesday in stores -- and on the Web in Windows Media 9 Series format. In what Microsoft claims is a Web first, the album comes in 5.1-channel surround-sound audio. Consumers can preview the entire album, before deciding whether to purchase "Up." The price was not immediately available. The surround-sound download is a hefty 188MB. A 62MB version of the file in “stereo” format is also available. The release of Gabriel's latest album in Windows Media Audio 9 format is the first showcase of some of the new media player's advanced features.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959156.html?tag=fd_top

U.K. backs cell phone recyclers
The British government lent its support on Tuesday to a new environmental scheme that aims to reuse or recycle the stockpile of 90 million mobile phones lying unused in the United Kingdom -- a pile that is growing by up to 15 million per year. The Fonebak project is the first mobile phone recycling plan to involve all five of the nation's cell phone operators as well as the Dixons Group of retail stores. It claims to benefit both business and the environment and is working to significantly reduce the amount of potentially harmful waste produced by the cell phone industry. Michael Meacher, minister of state for the environment, hailed Fonebak as a major breakthrough and congratulated the cell phone industry and Shield Environmental, the company behind the plan.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-959223.html?tag=fd_top

Building the underground computer railroad
In the run-up to the next meeting of delegates to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which will be held in Ecuador in late October, Nix and a handful of others have spent weeks turning unwanted computer parts donated to the ACCRC into working machines that they plan to use in their protest. Other volunteers are doing the same thing at Free Geek, a recycling center in Portland, Ore., and a group in Los Angeles is helping out as well. Together, the geek activists aim to build about 300 Linux machines, which they'll stuff into a shipping container and send down to Ecuador before the protest. People at the Independent Media Center pride themselves on the decentralized nature of their organization. There are no actual, official "leaders" -- but I'm here to see Evan Henshaw-Plath, who's the main force behind the Ecuador project. Henshaw-Plath is a 25-year-old programmer who once founded a dot-com and now runs a dot-net: protest.net, a calendar site used by various groups to schedule their demonstrations.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...eks/index.html

Tibetan culture finds digital saviour
Thousands of historical Tibetan books are going digital in an attempt to save Tibet's rich Buddhist-influenced literature. At the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in New York, a non-profit organisation, workers are scanning hundreds of millions of pages onto a computer. The works are being made available on CD-Rom and, eventually, also on the internet, so that everyone can have access to them. "They represent a history and a wisdom literature that we are just beginning to understand," explained E Gene Smith, founder and director of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center. The organisation does not charge for its services, relying instead on private donations. It has 12,000 volumes of Tibetan literature, possibly the biggest in the West or even in the world.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2271016.stm

Need Biowarfare Agent? Hop Online
The genome sequence of a potential biowarfare agent called Brucella is freely and publicly available to anyone with Internet access. A frightening thought, perhaps, considering terrorists certainly have Internet access. But experts say it's highly unlikely they would also have the scientific sophistication to use the information to make a weapon. Although it's controversial, many scientists believe making the pathogen's blueprint publicly available can lead to more good than harm. Sharing the genome sequence, which was deciphered by researchers at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), will help scientists develop vaccines and find faster ways to identify the bacteria.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55331,00.html

I Fought the Future for the CIA
It started with an email from a friend, asking if I was available to visit “a certain Washington agency.” There soon followed a flurry of messages from people I didn’t know – some of them bearing that most shadowy of return addresses: ucia.gov. And then a weighty package in the mail, bursting with federal documents, and then forms and disclaimers. My mission, should I choose to accept it: sit in a room full of fellow sci-fi writers and help imagine, shall we say, things that might someday go bump. But first there was a definite moment of double take, and then a scramble to confirm that this wasn’t some elaborate hoax. Because, like, the CIA needs my advice on scariness? Let’s face it: The FBI, the NSA, and even Israel’s Mossad are second-rate bogeymen. When it comes to the paranoid fantasies of hit lists and ESP drugs, gigabuck dope deals, and orbiting mind-control lasers, the Agency rules.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...tart.html?pg=5

Falun Gong Hijacks Chinese TV
In their most brazen electronic hacking yet, supporters of the outlawed Falun Gong movement have staged a "TV hijacking" by interrupting transmissions on a satellite system that broadcasts to every corner of China, the government asserted Tuesday night. Using its official Xinhua News Agency, the government released an extraordinary 1,100-word dispatch about the latest hacking incident, saying it had traced the illegal transmissions over the Sino Satellite, or Sinosat, system to a pirate broadcast operation in Taipei, Taiwan. Falun Gong has made a practice in recent months of hacking into local TV feeds and broadcasts, often broadcasting pirate transmissions to tout the benefits of the group and convince the citizenry that Chinese authorities have treated it unfairly. China says such transmissions have "disrupted the public order" and go against international communications standards.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55350,00.html

P2P Pugilists Put Up Their Dukes
In a panel discussion steeped in dogma, adherents on both sides of the Internet peer-to-peer (P2P) debate accused each other of everything from aiding thieves to destroying the Internet. James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, said P2P advocates are trying to "live out Karl Marx's dream that we can take anything we want." Said Phil Corwin, a lawyer at the Washington firm of Butera & Andrews, which represents P2P network Kazaa: "I don't think file sharing can be shut down short of shutting down the Internet." And that was before things got really heated.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55294,00.html

FBI Fingerprint Research Helps Spawn an Industry
To a large extent, the modern biometrics industry was born out of efforts to commercialize the Federal Bureau of Investigation's groundbreaking fingerprint scanning technology. In the mid-1960s, the FBI asked researchers at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) to study the feasibility of using technology to "read" the unique ridges and whorls of human fingerprints, said Robert Last, a computer specialist and acting section chief in the FBI's national fingerprinting division. Delivered to the FBI in 1972, the first prototype device based on that research was several feet tall, nearly as wide and "extremely slow," Last said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Sep23.html

Speed record for UK rocket
British rocket engineers are celebrating the successful launch of their Deimos-Odyssey hybrid rocket from the Black Rock desert in Nevada, US. Although a minor malfunction prevented the rocket from exceeding the 10,700 metres (35,000 feet) altitude record held by the team, it did reach 7,600 m (25,000 ft) and score a number of impressive firsts. The researchers say it is the largest, most sophisticated and powerful rocket of its type ever built in the UK. During its flight it reached 1,600 km/h (992 mph), the fastest that any UK rocket has ever travelled. "Our next goal is space," Ben Jarvis, of the Mars advanced rocketry group (Mars), told BBC News Online via satellite link from the Nevada desert.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2278051.stm

UN seeks anti-cloning treaty
A worldwide treaty to ban human reproductive cloning is a step closer after the United Nations sets up a working party to draft an agreement. The UN General Assembly's legal committee, meeting on Monday, has created the group to begin wording the treaty. However, the process is expected to take years, with all 190 member nations given the opportunity to have their say on the issue. Many countries are introducing their own legislation to outlaw human cloning. Controversial scientist Dr Severino Antinori has already said that he is working to create the first human baby clone. Although many experts say it could be some years before he succeeds, he says that technical advances mean that success could be swift.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2278428.stm

Cybercrime code ready
Internet service providers are preparing for a new cybercrime code of conduct that will detail how much data they should keep on subscribers in order to co-operate with police and other law enforcement agencies. The Internet Industry Association (IIA) is about to release the draft of its Cybercrime code of conduct, chairman Justin Milne said. The draft code is the result of more than a year of collaboration between the internet industry and representatives from police and crime authorities. It represents an apparently successful attempt by the internet industry to avoid specific new laws being introduced to specify compliance with authorities. "What the code does is it ties the legislation into the practicalities of everyday life," Mr Milne said. "The legislation is framed in general terms and doesn't get down to the specifics.
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...E15306,00.html

Ultrasound blood purifier tackles fat problem
A new ultrasonic device that removes tiny fat droplets from blood should help prevent brain damage after heart surgery. Two thirds of patients undergoing major heart operations suffer some form of mental impairment afterwards, such as a reduced ability to perform mental arithmetic or remember phone numbers. In half of these patients the problems are permanent. The cause is still controversial, but most researchers think that minute fat droplets lodging in the blood vessels of the brain are responsible. It is thought these block the supply of oxygen to tiny clusters of nerve cells. Dixon Moody at Wake Forest University in North Carolina - who originally proposed the idea in 1990 - estimates that patients can develop three million clots during surgery. He says: "The only time we saw them was in patients that had had heart surgery. They were all over the place in the brain."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992834

Female circumcision does not reduce sexual activity
Circumcised women experience sexual arousal and orgasm as frequently as uncircumcised women, according to a study in Nigeria. The researchers also found no difference in the frequency of intercourse or age of first sexual experience between the two groups of women. These findings remove key arguments used to defend the practice, they say. Friday Okonofua and colleagues at the Women's Health and Action Research Centre in Benin City studied 1836 women, 45 per cent of whom had been circumcised. During the operation, all or part of the clitoris and the labia are removed. Proponents of female circumcision claim it makes virginity at marriage and marital fidelity more likely. Opponents condemn it as dangerous and painful.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992837

Piece of Apollo Rocket Visits Earth's Orbit
A long-lost piece of an Apollo rocket has returned to Earth's orbit after decades of racing around the sun, the first time our planet has captured an object from solar orbit, astronomers said last week. The new satellite is most likely the third stage of a massive Saturn V rocket that lifted Apollo 12 astronauts to the moon in November 1969, astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said last week. Last seen in an elongated 43-day orbit around Earth, the bus-sized rocket stage escaped Earth orbit in March 1971, the laboratory's Paul Chodas said in a statement. Known now as J002E3 and first seen by an amateur astronomer on Sept. 3, the rocket stage probably completed nine or 10 Earth orbits, then swung far enough toward the sun to be pulled into a sun-centered orbit, Chodas said.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/storie...09/25/049.html

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Hiya and thanks WT sweetie!

Originally posted by walktalker
P2P Pugilists Put Up Their Dukes
In a panel discussion steeped in dogma, adherents on both sides of the Internet peer-to-peer (P2P) debate accused each other of everything from aiding thieves to destroying the Internet. James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, said P2P advocates are trying to "live out Karl Marx's dream that we can take anything we want." Said Phil Corwin, a lawyer at the Washington firm of Butera & Andrews, which represents P2P network Kazaa: "I don't think file sharing can be shut down short of shutting down the Internet." And that was before things got really heated.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55294,00.html

But of course! Napsterites have known all along that filesharing is communism and that Shawn Fanning is the American embodiment of Lenin - something for the future generations of Red America to be proud about!



- tg