The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Start-up preaches hack-proof Linux
Start-up Guardian Digital has launched an effort to sell a version of Linux that's less vulnerable to attack, a niche the company hopes will gain it a foothold in the market for the Unix-like operating system. The Allendale, N.J.-based start-up released its EnGarde Secure Professional product Tuesday, a version of Linux that comes with management tools and server software designed to thwart attacks. The product costs $549, plus $219 per year for a mandatory software update service. Linux, like the Unix operating system on which it's based and other operating systems, has had its share of security problems, but often the problems come with higher-level software such as the SNMP service for letting administrators manage servers or the Apache program for sending Web pages to browsers. Guardian Digital aims to stomp out many of those problems by what software is used, testing it with the other software and in some cases writing new programs, said Chief Executive Dave Wreski.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-959319.html

Red Hat Linux drips from Web leak
Parts of the newest version of Red Hat's Linux software slipped onto the Internet Wednesday, nearly a week before the operating system's official release date, giving glimpses of a product with a new focus on mainstream computer users. Web surfers were able to download software updates and release notes describing what's in the package at a third-party download site, according to postings to a Red Hat mailing list. The site no longer has the packages. "It's inevitable that packages start to leak out," said Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day. The company plans to release the Red Hat 8 software on Monday, including the "ISO" files, from which installation CD-ROMs can easily be made, Day said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-959434.html

Mobile breakthrough -- wideband-CDMA
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). On Thursday, Nokia intends to announce that w-CDMA cell phones it developed now meet the requirements set by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a cell phone standards body. The 3GPP seal of approval is considered vital for any new generation of phone equipment.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-959267.html

Greece lets the games begin again
Its game on again for Greek computer buffs who had been banned by the government from playing electronic games. The government, in an effort to curtail illegal gaming, passed a law earlier this year banning the use of electronic games that included popular football and motor racing simulators. It arrested bar and arcade owners for illegally converting machines to pay out cash instead of bonus playing time. But on Tuesday night, the Finance Ministry gave the green light for the use of electronic games on condition "no financial benefit" was involved.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-959365.html

IBM spreads Linux to retailers
IBM has made some progress in its effort to spread the Linux operating system far and wide, selling thousands of high-tech cash registers to two sizable customers. Regal Entertainment Group, which operates hundreds of theaters, will use the systems in 2,700 concession stands by the end of this year and in 3,500 stands by the end of next, IBM plans to announce Wednesday. And Casas Bahia, a Brazilian retailer, plans to install 1,500 of the systems in 320 stores. Both customers are using Red Hat's version of Linux in the IBM "point-of-sale" terminals, the special-purpose networked PCs that serve the role once held by basic cash registers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-959314.html

Study: Labels should turn to tech
Media companies must put less emphasis on protecting digital content and instead find ways to make money from digital music and movies if they hope to beat back copyright pirates who threaten their businesses, according to a study released on Wednesday from KPMG. The tax, assurance and financial consulting firm said the responsibility for finding new digital business models lies with the boards of directors and not just with mid-level managers. With an estimated $8 billion to $10 billion in lost revenues annually, the issue should be a corporate governance matter. "What we don't see is a real questioning of business models," said Ashley Steel, a partner in KPMG's Information, Communications and Entertainment practice.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-959377.html

Mozilla flies over speed bumps
The Mozilla development project introduced a new, swifter Web browser, called Phoenix, to smooth over some of the speed bumps of its previous navigation tool. The group, sponsored by AOL Time Warner-owned Netscape Communications, launched Phoenix 0.1 on Monday, improving on Mozilla 1.1, which was introduced in August to mixed reviews. The latest browser, which is based on much of the Mozilla code, includes a customizable toolbar, new design, improved bookmark manager and loads in nearly half the time of Mozilla 1.1. "Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features," according to the project page on the Mozilla development home page.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-959310.html

FrontPage flaw puts servers in jeopardy
Microsoft warned Web site administrators on Wednesday that a flaw in its FrontPage extensions could allow an attacker to take control of their servers or cause the computers to seize up. In its 53rd advisory for the year, the software giant said a vulnerability in the SmartHTML interpreter could be exploited to cause a denial-of-service attack on the Web server if the computer had FrontPage Server Extensions 2000 running. For FrontPage Server Extensions 2002, the flaw could result in the attacker running the code of their choice, essentially taking control of the server. "If a request for a certain type of Web file is made in a particular way...(it could cause) the SmartHTML interpreter to cycle endlessly, consuming all the server's CPU availability," according to Microsoft's advisory.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-959577.html?tag=fd_top

AOL previews second Tolkien film
AOL Time Warner has said it will debut the promotional trailer for "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" on America Online in a move to draw traffic to the online service. The trailer, a compilation of scenes from the upcoming movie, will be available for a 24-hour period beginning at 9:01 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 30, New Line said in a statement issued Tuesday. "Two Towers" is the second movie based on the classic J.R.R. Tolkien novels about an epic struggle between good and evil in the fictional land of Middle-Earth that is inhabited by elves, hobbits and wizards.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959573.html?tag=fd_top

Microsoft puts a price on IM features
Microsoft is preparing a version of MSN Messenger with new features that will be available exclusively to paying subscribers of the MSN 8 online service. The Redmond, Wash.-based company plans to release the new instant messaging client, MSN Messenger 5, simultaneously with the launch of MSN 8. That launch could happen as early as October, which should also see the release of version 8 of online service software from AOL Time Warner's America Online unit. AOL unveiled the latest update to its popular AOL Instant Messenger product, version 5, last week. Microsoft plans to offer two versions of MSN Messenger 5, one as part of MSN 8 and another as a separate standalone product. But some of the best new features will only be available to MSN 8 customers, who must pay a fee to use the service. An additional feature will be available exclusively to Windows XP users.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959500.html?tag=fd_top

University bans controversial links
The University of California at San Diego has ordered a student organization to delete hyperlinks to an alleged terrorist Web site, citing the recently enacted USA Patriot Act. School administrators have told the group, called the Che Cafe Collective, that linking to a site supporting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) would not be permitted because it violated federal law. In a letter to the Che Cafe Collective, UCSD University Centers Director Gary Ratcliff said the hyperlink violated a law that bans "providing material support to support terrorists." Ratcliff warned that the student organization would face disciplinary action if it did not immediately remove the link to FARC.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959544.html?tag=fd_top

Prices fall for CD-rewritable drives
Shipments of CD-rewritable drives jumped to unexpected levels earlier this year, while sales suffered -- a combination that could mean a happy holiday season for price-minded consumers. The market for CD-RW drives is so oversaturated that prices of some models have fallen below $100. Best Buy is selling an internal 40x Sony CD-RW drive for $84.92 before a $20 mail-in rebate, as well as an internal 40x Digital Research CD-RW drive for $65.92 without a rebate. "In the first quarter there was some channel stuffing, where the numbers were unexplainably high, and we're still seeing the effects of a correction," said Wolfgang Schlichting, an analyst with research firm IDC.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959494.html?tag=fd_top

Technology vs. Civil Liberties?
It's been two years now but House Majority Leader Dick Armey is still steamed about Super Bowl XXXV, and it's not because he's a Giants fan. As Armey strolled into Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, on his way to watch the Baltimore Ravens trounce New York, the Texas Republican unwittingly entered a virtual police line-up alongside thousands of other football fans. Law enforcement officials used technology developed by a Massachusetts company called Viisage Technology Inc. to scan faces in the throng, looking for any wanted criminals who may have been in attendance. Although they didn't know it, the football fans took part in one of the largest-ever field tests of face-recognition technology, one of the newest developments in the budding field of biometric security.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Sep24.html

News beats porn online
Employees are far more likely to be addicted to news than to pornography, a survey has found. Websense, a San Diego-based firm which provides software to monitor web habits at work, has found that news sites are proving the real internet addiction for employees. It has to be said, of course, that most companies block access to porn sites. Just over 20% of those surveyed said that they thought news was the most addictive web content, compared to 18% for pornography and 8% for gambling sites. Nearly 70% of people admitted surfing news sites for personal reasons.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2278743.stm

Liquid Audio's future remains fluid
The mute button may be pressed this week on yet another Net music pioneer. Liquid Audio, a well-regarded music technology company whose recent troubles are more befitting of an episode of "Behind the Music," will meet with its shareholders for the most important vote in the company's six-year lifespan. At stake is a planned merger, control over the board of directors, and the future of the company over demands by some shareholders who want to liquidate it to save its still-substantial cash reserves. While Napster and Madster ran into a legal buzz saw with their file-swapping services, Liquid Audio attempted to play by the rules by working with record companies and copyright holders. But in the end it could meet the same fate.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959323.html

China arrests Web writer for subversion
China has arrested a laid-off Internet writer suspected of subversion for publishing articles on the country's social and legal problems on overseas Web sites, a U.S.-based journalists rights group said. Chen Shaowen's arrest in the southern province of Hunan was the government's latest move to rein in the activity of Internet writers and surfers, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement seen Wednesday. China has stepped up a media crackdown ahead of a pivotal Communist Party congress in November, forcing a regime of self-censorship on major commercial sites and blocking sensitive material on the popular Google Internet search engine.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959409.html?tag=cd_mh

Musicmatch joins with Canadian telecom
Internet music software and streaming company Musicmatch has struck a distribution deal with telecommunications giant Bell Canada, joining the ranks of Net content companies wooing Internet service providers. The Musicmatch RadioMX subscription radio service will be distributed and marketed by Bell Canada, and subscribers can pay for it along with their DSL (digital subscriber line) service, the companies said. The deal could mark a critical distribution channel for Musicmatch, which is fending off challenges across its business from much larger companies, including AOL and Microsoft.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959316.html?tag=cd_mh

Rocket Scientists Find a Rocket
Sometimes, astronomers really do need to use rocket science when they observe unidentified objects in the sky. Especially if they wind up identifying, well, a rocket. NASA scientists used a combination of high technology and backyard astronomers' observations to confirm the identity of an object that's been circling the earth since early September. Since its first sighting on Sept. 3, scientists had suspected that the 60-foot-long object, named JOO2E3, was a small asteroid. But further observations have proven that JOO2E3 was manufactured by humans, and is probably the long-lost third stage of the Apollo 12 rocket that took astronauts to the moon in 1969.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55364,00.html

Famed Nanotech Researcher Axed
A star researcher in electronics at Bell Labs has been fired after an outside review committee found he falsified experimental data. The committee concluded that Jan Hendrik Schon, 32, made up or altered data at least 16 times between 1998 and 2001, the first case of scientific fraud in the 77-year history of the Nobel Prize-winning laboratory, Lucent said Wednesday. Bell Labs, which used to be part of AT&T, is the research arm of Lucent Technologies. The research involved work by Schon and other scientists in the hot fields of superconductivity, molecular electronics and molecular crystals. The findings were published in several prominent scientific publications, including the journals Science, Nature and Applied Physics Letters.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55391,00.html

Kazaa Taunts Record Biz: Catch Us
In a war with media conglomerates hoping to shut down its Kazaa file-trading service, Sharman Networks has flipped the familiar slogan, "think globally, act locally." Despite an ongoing American copyright-infringement lawsuit, the Australian company has so far evaded the international recording industry's attempts to shut down Kazaa by setting up operations around the globe. It has offices in the United States, the South Pacific island nation Vanuatu and the Netherlands. On Monday, Italian ISP Tiscali agreed to advertise its broadband services through Kazaa. The agreement could make the recording industry's attempts to shutter Kazaa that much more difficult because individual countries are responsible for regulating the Internet within their borders. Stronger ties between ISPs and file-trading companies could bolster Kazaa's defenses.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,55356,00.html

DTV's Political Stakes Run High
Broadcasters and cable television system operators squared off in front of Congress Tuesday, angling for advantage in a proposed bill that would require them to switch to digital signals by the end of 2006. Lawmakers, meanwhile, fretted that consumers could ultimately suffer the most if their existing TVs, VCRs and other video devices become obsolete in the next four years. The political costs for a botched transition could be high, suggested New York Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55400,00.html

Vigilante Justice for Copyright Holders
Big Media has become adept at using lawsuits to smother centralized file-swapping services like Napster. But peer-to-peer networks that have no central server are another matter — there’s no one to sue. Representative Howard Berman (D-California) has drafted a bill that would exempt copyright owners from computer-fraud laws if they fight back using measures such as “interdiction, decoy, redirection, file-blocking, and spoofing.” Some might call it vigilantism. Berman calls it “technological self-help.”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/view.html?pg=3

FBI Unable to Connect 9/11 Dots The two leads arrived at FBI headquarters weeks apart in the summer of 2001. The first, from a Phoenix agent, warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists may be learning to fly at U.S. schools. The second described a suspicious student pilot in Minnesota named Zacarias Moussaoui. But the leads weren't put together until after terrorists crashed four hijacked airliners at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a rural Pennsylvania field. At a hearing Tuesday, lawmakers asked what would have happened if someone had linked the two earlier. Could the attacks have been prevented? An FBI counterterrorism supervisor replied that it was unlikely those leads ever could have been connected, given headquarters' limited staff and poor computer systems.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55380,00.html

China: Just Say No to Hacking
Responding to accusations that China's government tried to break into the Dalai Lama's computer network, a government spokeswoman said Wednesday that Beijing opposes all computer hacking. The spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry's press division said she had no details on the accusation by the computer manager for the Tibetan Buddhist leader's government in exile in India. However, she said, "The Chinese government always opposes the activities of hackers." The spokeswoman, contacted by telephone, wouldn't give her name. Jigme Tsering, manager of the Tibetan Computer Resource Center in Dharmsala, India, asserted Tuesday that Chinese hackers had designed a special virus to plug into the network and steal information.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55382,00.html

China Continues Web Crackdown
A Chinese author who posted essays about politics on the Internet has been arrested on subversion charges, a police official said Wednesday. Chen Shaowen was detained in August in Lianyuan, a city in the central province of Hunan, after posting "a lot of reactionary articles and essays" online, said the official, contacted by telephone in Lianyuan. He wouldn't give his name. Chen was formally arrested this month, the official said. He wouldn't give any other details, and an official who answered the telephone at the Hunan provincial headquarters of the State Security Bureau refused to give any information.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55384,00.html

Junked PCs Offer Data for Taking
Many security experts agree that "dustbin computer" data poses a legitimate threat, if not to the fate of the nation, then to individuals' privacy rights. Consider pop icon Paul McCartney. His manager once sold some old PCs with financial records still intact on the hard drive, revealing to a not terribly surprised world that the ex-Beatle is not, in fact, a pauper. "You can find used drives on the cheap in bulk from any number of sources," said security consultant Richard Forno. "Anyone selling used hard drives should sanitize them thoroughly. Absent that, you will always have information getting out.... (It's) a very bad problem."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,54986,00.html

Make Room for Bioinformatics
To many Washingtonians, the mention of Springfield conjures up nightmares of a highway free-for-all and an unfathomable tangle of half-finished concrete bridges. But if Fairfax County economic development officials succeed, Springfield will one day be better known as a leading center of bioinformatics, the maturing field that applies information technology to speed up drug discovery and other biotech research. Two tenants are setting up shop this week in the new Fairfax County BioAccelerator, a 15,000-square-foot bioinformatics incubator on the second floor of a modest two-story office building near the Springfield Metro station.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Sep24.html

France to unveil air-powered car
Engineers in France believe they have come up with the answer that environmentalists and economists have spent years searching for: a commercially viable, 100% non-polluting car, which costs next to nothing to run. The latest prototype will be unveiled on Thursday at the Paris motor show. Like everything else about this vehicle, it all sounds impossible. When we went to the company's factory-cum-design shop just outside Nice in the South of France a black blanket was put between us and it. But we were told it has a steering wheel in the middle, with passenger seats either side, a boot the size of the biggest estate, but in overall size terms is no bigger than a Smart car.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2281011.stm

NASA Invention Pinpoints Lightning Strikes
If lightning really never struck twice in the same place, Dr. Pedro Medelius's job would be a lot easier. But since bolts from the blue can hit wherever they please, figuring out what's been zapped within the 140,000 acres of NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) could seem hopeless. However, when lives and millions of taxpayer dollars are on the line, NASA can't afford to just hope sensitive equipment is OK after a thunderstorm. Anything that may have been hit or damaged by a lightning strike must be checked, particularly around shuttle launch pads. Their invention, which NASA has now patented for sale to the public, was christened the Sonic Lightning Locator (SOLLO).
http://www.space.com/businesstechnol...es_020925.html

Fold fully forecast
Using computer simulations, scientists have correctly predicted how a protein folds into its final shape purely from its genetic code. A protein's form dictates its function. Forecasting what these molecules of life look like from their gene sequence is one of the most important challenges facing biology following the decoding of the human genome and that of other animals. It would have, as the late biochemist Peter Kollman of the University of California once said, "a tremendous impact in all of biotechnology and drug design".
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020923/020923-4.html

Tough Earth bug may be from Mars
A hardy microbe that can withstand huge doses of radiation could have evolved this ability on Mars. That is the conclusion of Russian scientists who say it would take far longer than life has existed here for the bug to evolve that ability in Earth's clement conditions. They suggest the harsher environment of Mars makes it a more likely birthplace. The hardy bugs could have travelled to Earth on pieces of rock that were blasted into space by an impacting asteroid and fell to Earth as meteorites. Deinococcus radiodurans is renowned for its resistance to radiation - it can survive several thousand times the lethal dose for humans. To investigate how the trait might have evolved, Anatoli Pavlov and his colleagues from the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St Petersburg tried to induce it in E. coli.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992844

"Hidden tree" the secret of Zen garden
The secret of the mysterious, centuries-old appeal of the Ryoanji Temple garden in Kyoto has been solved, claim scientists in Japan. They think visitors unconsciously detect a "hidden" tree pattern, which explains why the sparse arrangement is so pleasing to the eye. Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors to the UNESCO world heritage site view the seemingly random composition of five rock and moss clusters set in an otherwise empty rectangle of raked gravel. The unknown designer left no explanation for the layout of the garden, thought to be created shortly after 1499, during a period of innovation in the visual arts in Japan.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992838

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Thank you WT!

Originally posted by walktalker
Kazaa Taunts Record Biz: Catch Us
In a war with media conglomerates hoping to shut down its Kazaa file-trading service, Sharman Networks has flipped the familiar slogan, "think globally, act locally." Despite an ongoing American copyright-infringement lawsuit, the Australian company has so far evaded the international recording industry's attempts to shut down Kazaa by setting up operations around the globe. It has offices in the United States, the South Pacific island nation Vanuatu and the Netherlands. On Monday, Italian ISP Tiscali agreed to advertise its broadband services through Kazaa. The agreement could make the recording industry's attempts to shutter Kazaa that much more difficult because individual countries are responsible for regulating the Internet within their borders. Stronger ties between ISPs and file-trading companies could bolster Kazaa's defenses.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,55356,00.html

The copyright nazis have scored a series of 'victories' with Napster, AudioGalaxy and Aimster. However, in the bigger picture they have just been losing - time, resources, consumer sympathy - while the p2p technology has kept advancing and the number of p2p users has grown hundred-fold from the times of Napster. Anyway, it is a pleasure to see Kazaa outsmarting them time after time... I wouldn't mind Kazaa being the first big case that they lose...

from the above story:

Even as the U.S. recording industry continues its global pursuit of Kazaa, it must also cope with the growing perception that peer-to-peer networks encourage broadband use in America.

Economists at the Brookings Institute estimated that widespread broadband would increase the gross domestic product by $500 billion, according to a study released by the U.S. Department of Commerce. But consumers have been slow to adopt costly high-speed access, citing its lack of relevance to their lives.

"A majority of consumers will sign up for broadband when value-adding applications and services are readily available, easily understood and offered at reasonable prices," the study reported.

Consumers cited telecommuting and online video games as two important factors in their decision to sign up for broadband access. But the most compelling service, the study found, is the ability to download movies and music.

So far, such services have only been available through the very file-trading networks the entertainment industry has tried to quash.

- tg