The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

News everywhere !!

Spam hits 36 percent of e-mail traffic
Corporate networks are becoming increasingly clogged by e-mail pitches for pornography, money-making schemes and health products, and there's little relief on the horizon. Once a mild annoyance, unsolicited bulk e-mail -- also known as spam -- could make up the majority of message traffic on the Internet by the end of 2002, according to data from three e-mail service providers. Businesses "are seeing an enormous increase in spam," said Enrique Salem, CEO of anti-spam service provider Brightmail. "It's become a huge problem." In July, according to Brightmail's latest interception figures, unsolicited bulk e-mail made up a whopping 36 percent of all e-mail traveling over the Internet, up from 8 percent about a year ago.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-955842.html

Settlement fuels Windows XP update
Microsoft is finishing work on an update to its Windows XP operating system, clearing the way for public release of the software within the next few days, sources say. The software giant periodically issues free updates, known as service packs, in order to fix bugs or revamp security software. The Windows XP update is unique, however, because it adds a new control for setting default middleware -- such as Web browser and media player software -- as required by Microsoft's pending antitrust settlement with the Justice Department and nine of the 18 states that sued the company. In court papers filed Wednesday to document Microsoft's progress in complying with the proposed settlement, the software giant said that "in the next few days, Microsoft will release SP1 for Windows XP." Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan would not elaborate on the timing of the release, other than to say that it is "still on target for the next couple of weeks."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-955912.html

E-mail doesn't deliver customer service
If you're looking for a quick response to a customer service question, don't count on e-mail, according to a new study. Only a third of the companies surveyed by Jupiter Research bothered to immediately acknowledge they had gotten customers' e-mail in the first place, sending an automatic response. Most of the companies did eventually respond to consumers, but don't hold your breath; only 52 percent got back within 24 hours, while 32 percent took three days or longer. Those response rates could come back to haunt Web sites. Earlier studies Jupiter has done found that 59 percent of high-spending consumers (those who spend more than $500 online over six months) expect a resolution within 24 hours of firing off an e-mail.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-955947.html

JVC claims 'uncopyable' CD-ROM
Consumer electronics maker JVC and games developer Hudson Soft have developed a new copy-protection technology that they claim will prevent CD-ROM discs from being copied, the companies said on Wednesday. The technology, called "Root", marks the latest effort by the computer industry to control software piracy through technical means. The Root technology -- so named because it is intended to prevent illegal copying "from the Roots up" -- uses encryption keys, a method that has been tried in the past. The disc's contents are encrypted, so that it cannot be read without a "key" also placed on the disc. The innovation in this case is that the key is hidden in such a way that it can be read by any CD-ROM drive, but cannot be written by a CD-R/RW drive, so that a copied version of the disc would be unreadable. The key is different for each disc, and is hidden in a different place each time, according to the companies.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-955918.html

AOL launches new Netscape browser
Netscape Communications on Thursday launched the latest version of its Web browser amid mounting evidence that most Internet surfers are choosing Microsoft's Internet Explorer instead. The new version, dubbed Netscape 7.0, does not stray very far from the preview version unveiled in May. The browser places particular emphasis on faster Web surfing and cross-promoting other content properties throughout AOL Time Warner, Netscape's parent company. The browser also comes bundled with other software, such as the popular AOL Instant Messenger, AOL's Spinner Web radio service and RealNetworks's RealPlayer.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-955850.html

GM drives a Big Blue supercomputer
IBM said on Thursday it had sold a series of large computers to U.S. automobile manufacturer General Motors, which together create one of the world's top ten supercomputers. The auto industry's most powerful supercomputer will increase GM's supercomputing muscle by a factor of four. "It will help the company improve vehicle development processes," IBM said in a statement. The dozen or so computers that will be located in different locations in Europe and the United States, will together be capable of four trillion calculations per second. This computing power is needed for crash simulations and for rapid checks of quality and design structures.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-955877.html

Games push for more than pretty faces
Looks aren't everything. That's the message being sent by a group of designers at the Game Developers Conference here, who say that as the visuals in their titles approach a lifelike appearance, it's time to focus on other things. "The danger is that we end up spending 99 percent of the time modeling dust particles hanging in the air and 1 percent of the time on gameplay," said Peter Molyneux, creator of the game "Black & White." Molyneux and his cohorts in the industry have watched game consoles become ever more powerful, allowing developers to work more and more polygons into their designs to make them smoother and more realistic.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-955964.html?tag=fd_top

Rub-a-dub-dub, IBM in a tub
IBM is rolling out new technology that may be powerful enough to stop college students from bringing laundry home to mom and dad for the weekend. The system, called eSuds and developed by IBM and USA Technologies, will let students swipe a credit card or punch a code into their cell phones to pay for washing or drying their clothes instead of scrounging in backpacks and desk drawers for quarters. The souped-up washers and dryers will also let students check a Web site for empty machines. From the comfort of their desktop or laptop, they will be able to add soap and fabric softener that is dispensed by the washing machine. Finally when the wash is done, they will get an e-mail telling them to come and get it.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-955973.html?tag=fd_top

Fox, RealNetworks kick off live sports
FoxSports.com is teaming up with RealNetworks to video broadcast live college football games over the Internet, the companies said Thursday. The companies will Webcast live video from match-ups between colleges in the Big 12 division, beginning Aug. 31 with either Texas A&M against the University of Louisiana-Lafayette or the University of Nebraska against Troy State. The deal will only be available to subscribers of RealNetworks' RealOne SuperPass, a service that charges $9.95 a month for programming from outlets such as ABCNews, CNN and Major League Baseball. Live Webcasting of video remains an experiment for professional sports leagues, media companies and Internet services.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955965.html?tag=fd_top

Electronic evidence anchors porn case
A Rochester, N.Y., federal judge on Thursday sentenced a former Xerox engineer accused of trafficking in child pornography to nearly four years in prison. The government's prosecution of Larry Benedict, 45, is unusual because all the evidence in the case is electronic, and all of the evidence appears to have been tampered with or otherwise altered after it was in government custody. Benedict pleaded guilty to the child pornography charges in June 2001 after being refused full access to the hard drives, floppy disks and tape backups that federal agents seized in an evening raid on his home in February 1995. Because no physical child pornography was found, the case against Benedict rests entirely on the contents of the electronic storage media.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955961.html?tag=fd_top

Webmaster indicted for terror support
A federal grand jury has indicted the founder of the StopAmerica.org Web site on charges of aiding al-Qaida terrorists. Prosecutors say Earnest James Ujaama, 36, who was born James Earnest Thompson, conspired to create an al-Qaida boot camp in rural Oregon. Ujaama also helped al-Qaida with computer training and Internet propaganda, according to the 9-page indictment released late Wednesday. Ujaama is a well-known Seattle activist who was arrested by the FBI last month and was held as a material witness until charges could be filed. In addition to operating the StopAmerica.org site, which quotes Ujaama as accusing the United States of "conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes of terrorism against Muslim people," the government says he designed a site called the Supporters of Shariah.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955939.html?tag=fd_top

Meet Mr. Anti-Google
Daniel Brandt is a 54-year-old webmaster in San Antonio, Texas, and he's not a fan of Google. He knows that opinion puts him in the minority. Some people have insulted him for it, and others -- mostly webmasters -- have told him please shut up, lest Google get upset. "I've heard all the stories about Google -- how the former cook for the Grateful Dead serves up their lunches," he says, reciting a point of the Google mythology. "I know people love them, and I've been censored on some of the webmaster forums when I get too upset at Google." But Brandt doesn't care, and he's not going to stop saying it, even if people get mad at him: Google's no good. Brandt believes that the search engine is unfair, and it doesn't -- as many people think -- return the best search results. Brandt runs google-watch.org, a new site that he hopes will act as "point of reference for privacy advocates, journalists and bloggers" who want to know the truth about Google.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...h/index.html?x

Napster's bankruptcy road nears end
The assets of the long-shuttered Napster file-swapping service are expected to wind up in the hands of benefactor Bertelsmann Thursday, as the near-defunct start-up's bankruptcy hearings close. Napster agreed to sell itself to Bertelsmann for just $9 million, barring the appearance of any other bidders in a bankruptcy court auction. Despite an attempt by Napster's creditors to raise interest in a competing bid, no rivals to Bertelsmann emerged. The German media giant had already extended Napster close to $85 million in loans and contended that any rival bidders would have to take on that liability to exceed its bid. It's not clear what role, if any, Napster will have inside Bertelsmann, however. The company had been the darling of former Bertelsmann Chief Executive Thomas Middlelhoff, who left the company in late July.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955823.html?tag=cd_mh

In-car karaoke? The future is here
Honda Motor unveiled on Thursday a new voice-operated car navigation system to be offered on its Accord sedan this autumn, but the setup lacked the bells, whistles, and high-tech sing-along capabilities of the rival system Toyota Motor released earlier in the week. Honda, Japan's second-largest automaker, said its new navigation system, called InterNavi Premium Club, offers regularly updated traffic reports, news, maintenance and other information, as well as the ability to e-mail. It will be available as an option, and updates of the DVD map software will be free for three years.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-955936.html?tag=cd_mh

Killing the College Radio Star
Thousands of students will head back to the University of California at San Diego this fall, none more excited than Rishi Shah. The sophomore runs KSDT, the student radio station. It reaches only 50 students at any given time, and it's available only over the Internet. But college radio isn't about numbers. It's about fun, and Shah has high hopes for this year.Shah's jubilation could be short-lived. The Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, will soon issue a ruling that could force operations like KSDT to begin tracking every song streamed over the Net, recording how many people listen and reporting those results electronically. While it sounds simple enough, the ruling would force low-budget operations to add expensive hardware and software to comply with the order.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54726,00.html

Apple's Newton Just Won't Drop
Wise, a Web developer from Ontario, Canada, was impressed by the handheld's hardware: a big, clear screen; two PC card slots; external memory support; and long battery life. It can connect to Macs, PCs and Unix machines, as well as all kinds of networks, from wireless WiFi networks to the new, always-on GPRS cell-phone nets. It streams MP3s off the Net and can read headlines aloud that have been automatically fetched from online news sites. What is this amazing machine? The latest sleek Clié from Sony, or a skunkworks Pocket PC yet to hit the market? No, it's the granddaddy of them all: Apple's Newton, which is still going strong despite being discontinued by Apple in 1998.
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,54580,00.html

Memories Are Made of This
This was one event where everyone remembered to show up on time. The finals of the 11th Annual World Memory Championships, held in London, gathered together some of the world's sharpest minds for the ultimate celebration of cerebral virtuosity. Over three days, 32 competitors from as far away as India and Singapore put themselves through the mental equivalent of an Olympic decathlon in an effort to claim the title of best memory in the world. This time, the laurels for sharpest gray matter went to 34-year-old Andi Bell from the United Kingdom, who overthrew reigning champion Dominic O'Brien, who has dominated the event since its inception in 1992.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54785,00.html

Free-software guru Bruce Perens has a new information-technology solution
One thing most technology experts can agree on is that California's state government has squandered billions on ill-conceived information-technology (IT) projects in recent years. Whether it was the more than $100 million in taxpayer funds that state authorities admit were wasted on the state's automated child-support system or the more recent purchase of thousands of unneeded software licenses from Oracle, the sorry record is painfully clear. California desperately needs a more workable IT plan. Fortunately, in the spirit of the open-source software movement, free-software evangelist Bruce Perens has just offered one up.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/beat/

Good legs 'control' paralysed partners
Two men paralysed on one side of their body can walk again, thanks to an ingenious implant that uses signals from a healthy leg to control a paralysed one. Both men, aged 47 and 64, had been paralysed by strokes. Previously neither could walk unaided. But after sensors were placed over certain muscle groups on the healthy leg and stimulators implanted in the paralysed leg, they can now walk, stand and sit. The unique therapy allows a patient to move their paralysed leg in a natural way without being aware that they are doing it, says Wenwei Yu, who developed the technique at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. But it could be another five years or more before the technology becomes available, he says.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992726

Cosmic airbag could save the planet
Airbags could one day save the planet. At least, that is the view of one mathematician, who is suggesting that they could be used to nudge asteroids or comets that are on a collision course with the Earth gently out of harm's way. All sorts of ideas for deflecting objects heading for Earth have been touted since the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter in July 1994. These include detonating a nuclear bomb on their surface. But this might not work: some asteroids are more like a pile of rubble than a solid, and so would absorb the energy from a nuclear blast. Computer simulations by Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz suggest that a rubbly asteroid would absorb so much energy from a nuclear blast that the explosion would have little effect on the course of one of these "cosmic beanbags".
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992730

Rival replacement for DVDs announced
A high-capacity replacement for current DVD technology has been announced by NEC and Toshiba. But the replacement will be incompatible with a rival technology proposed by nine other companies in February. NEC and Toshiba said in a joint statement that the new technology "will allow manufacturers to continue to use existing DVD plants and equipment and so minimize the investment required for the transition to next-generation DVD players and drives." Blu-ray was developed by Sony, Sharp, Hitachi, LG, Matsushita (Panasonic) Thomson, Philips, Pioneer, and Samsung. Both technologies are set to debut in 2004. Both technologies use a blue laser for recording and playback, which has a shorter wavelength than the red lasers currently used in DVDs.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992740

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Zdravstvujte i spasiba! Tseluyu!

Legend builds China's first supercomputer
A collection of Chinese political and computing luminaries assembled in Beijing last week to applaud the launch of the country's first "self-developed" supercomputer. The Legend Deepcomp 1800 large scale computer system has been built by Hong Kong-based Legend Holdings, and is the first computer in the country to hit 1,000 GFLOPS. Legend said the machine ranked 25th in the world rankings of high-performance computers.

In a statement, Legend president and CEO Yang Yuanqing claimed the successful development of the system "will end the monopoly of foreign computer products in China's high-performance computing market". The 14-meter-long machine features 526 Intel Xeon CPUs, 272GB of RAM and 6TB of storage. It will be installed at the Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/26897.html

- tg

[ssj4_android]

I notice Mozilla 1.1 has a netscape icon on the task bar.

[multi]

did you try that chatzilla?