The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Windows hole opens credit card fraud
Microsoft late Wednesday said that a flaw in its Windows operating system could allow hackers to gain unauthorized access to thousands of computers. Microsoft issued a security alert, calling the flaw "critical." The flaw affects how more than a dozen Microsoft products, including programs for Windows and the Macintosh, handle digital certificates, which are used to certify the authenticity of a Web site or of software code. The flaw could let a Web site with a valid certificate issue a second, invalid one, which could enable unauthorized access to a computer as well as, among other things, the theft of user passwords or credit card numbers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-956729.html

Klez set to return -- but may backfire
A minor variant of the Klez virus is set to go into action Friday, erasing a host of files on infected hard drives. But the attack may also wipe out the attacker. The 8-month-old mass-mailing computer virus called Klez.E triggers its payload on the sixth day of March, May, September and November, erasing 14 different types of files, including Word documents and HTML files. But the variant has all but disappeared from the Internet, said Vincent Gullotto, director of the antivirus emergency response team at security company Network Associates, and the year's two remaining payloads should call attention to the few computers still infected with Klez.E, allowing the pest to be exterminated.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-956740.html

Maxtor mines new DiamondMax drives
Maxtor has refreshed its DiamondMax family of hard drives to serve up more data, and serve it up more quickly, for users of desktop PCs. The drive maker on Thursday announced that it has begun shipping four new drives, including the high-capacity DiamondMax 16 and DiamondMax Plus 9 drives for top-of-the-line desktop PCs. The company also introduced the DiamondMax Plus 8 for midrange PCs and the Fireball 3 for low-priced computers. The DiamondMax Plus 9 is Maxtor's highest-performance desktop PC drive to date. The drive pairs storage capacities of 60GB, 80GB, 120GB and 160GB with a rotation speed of 7,200 revolutions per minute.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-956693.html

UK looks to shed the IT "geek" image
Young people are going to be shown that IT can provide a fulfilling, rewarding and exciting career, thanks to a new government-backed initiative. E-skills UK has today launched a program to interest more young people in pursuing careers in IT. 'Go for IT Schools' Workshops' have been developed by e-skills UK and the careers service with the intention of changing the way secondary school pupils view the IT sector. E-skills UK hopes it can shake the unsexy stereotype of 'geeks in glasses' which has often made people steer clear of all things IT-related.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-956713.html

Wearable PCs to become fashionable
Wearable computing has so far been little more than a curiosity, but new technology and falling prices will mean dramatic growth for such products in the next few years, according to a new report. The Global Market for Wearable Computers, published this week by research firm Venture Development Corporation (VDC), predicts that shipments of wearable computers -- such as those worn on the wrist, belt, earring or in the fabric of clothing -- will grow by more than 50 percent a year through 2006, reaching more than $563m (£360m). Shipments totaled more than $70 million in 2001, the firm said. However, those figures could prove conservative, VDC said, if innovations such as building computers into clothing fabric prove a success. "The true potential for wearable computing in 2006 could be well over $1.3 billion, if improvements are made in consumer-based products, including commercially viable 'smart fabric' technology," said lead analyst Tim Shea in a statement.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-956695.html

Patent suit could dock eBay
eBay, one of the biggest success stories on the Web, is being threatened with a patent infringement lawsuit that could force it to modify its winning auction format. A loss could compel the Internet auction company to pay millions of dollars in royalties and damages and even to make significant changes to its business model. MercExchange founder Thomas Woolston, an inventor and patent attorney who has been granted four online auction-related patents since 1998 and has some 10 others pending, said he sued eBay in 2001 after negotiations broke down over the auction site's offer to purchase his patents. The company first contacted Woolston in 2000 with an interest in buying the patents, and e-mails to that effect are expected to figure prominently in the case since they indicate that eBay knew about his patents yet continued to infringe them, he said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-956638.html

Xbox Live to target hackers?
Microsoft may backtrack on an earlier pledge not to use its Xbox Live online gaming service to crack down on "mod chips"--chips that modify the Xbox console so it can run copied game discs and unlicensed software. The 14-page user agreement and privacy notice included with the first Xbox Live kits sent to beta testers specifies that Microsoft reserves the right to revoke Xbox Live privileges for anyone with a hacked Xbox and to scan consoles on the network to enforce its rights. A handful of gray-market Xbox mod chips have gone on sale in the past few months. Once soldered onto the Xbox's main circuit board, the chips disable various copy protection measures, allowing the machines to run legally or illegally copied discs, imported games and unlicensed software. Numerous hacking projects have emerged to use the chips to adapt Xbox units for use as media players and Linux boxes.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956785.html?tag=fd_top

Fantasy football players cry foul
The last of the major free fantasy football sites has instituted an 11th-hour plan to charge certain users, a move some team owners are calling a fumble. Sandbox.com, which touts "FREE" Fantasy Football on its site, has begun charging a $3.95 per month fee to use the site during "peak" hours. The new subscription hours run from 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PDT and from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. PDT -- coinciding with the minutes just before the games when some team owners are eager to make last-minute changes to their lineups. What's more, the company's plans to charge aren't clearly stated on the site. In fact, before assembling their fantasy teams -- which are made up of real NFL players -- potential owners must click several buttons promising "free" services. It's only when they go back to make changes to their roster that they're notified of the peak hours charges.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956784.html?tag=fd_top

Group to ease moving files to a new PC
Intel, IBM, Microsoft and several other hardware and software makers have formed a coalition to ease the pain of moving old data onto a new PC. The three heavy-hitters, along with lesser-known companies Altiris, Detto Technologies, Eisenworld, Laplink, Miramar Systems, Symantec and Tranxition, all pitched in to form the PC Migration Work Group, announced this week. The group will work to reduce the time and effort it takes to move data and personal settings from one PC to another. Typically it takes at least a couple of hours for a person to set up a replacement PC, which involves transferring data such as word processing documents and e-mail between the old and new machines. Users also typically have to tweak a host of Windows preferences and settings, the group said. Such hassles do little to increase a user's affection for the PC.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-956757.html?tag=fd_top

Death knell sounded for Web radio?
Internet radio sites may have to shut their doors or become music-free zones under the new royalty plan, according to a research report. Jupiter Research said royalty fees could bankrupt Web radio stations by forcing them to pay more to play songs than they could ever make up in advertising revenue -- a prediction that's already come true for dozens of stations that have ceased their Webcasts because of the payments. "While listening to online audio is up...streaming music has yet to produce a survivable -- let alone profitable -- business," the report said. Researchers said the only viable Web radio formats over the next 18 months to 24 months appear to be talk and sports radio.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956730.html?tag=cd_mh

Games push limits of PC hardware
Your new PC has the latest operating system, a speedy processor and lots of cool software. But can it handle the latest PC games? Maybe not. As game developers strive to offer ever-more sophisticated graphics, they're steadily pushing up the hardware requirements needed to run their latest products. That means the games won't run -- or won't run well -- on any machine on the market. "It's always a trade-off," said Michael Capps, producer of "Operations," part of the free "America's Army" game package released this year by the U.S. Army. "You want to have a product that looks good enough...but you want a large player base to have access to the software." The popularity of integrated chipsets, which give PC makers a cost-cutting alternative to standalone graphics processors, has added to the dilemma.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-955999.html

Sex.com Domain Thief Struck Again
The man who once claimed ownership of the domain name Sex.com has failed to persuade a federal appeals court to reconsider his case. In an unpublished decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco curtly tossed out the appeal by Steven Michael Cohen, the former operator of the Sex.com site, citing his decision to flee the country to avoid criminal prosecution. Cohen filed the appeal in the hopes of quashing a $65 million judgment handed down against him last year for using a forged letter to steal the valuable domain from its original owner, Gary Kremen. In previous court filings, Cohen claimed the judgment was too large and rendered him unable to afford basic necessities.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54962,00.html

Take the Money and Teach
For Jeff Seely, educating his kids about the importance of investing is a lot like dishing out broccoli. "It's good for you, but the challenge is not forcing it on them," said Seely, CEO of ShareBuilder, an investing site based in Bellevue, Washington, that lets people purchase small amounts of stocks and other equities through regular monthly contributions. Rather than shove investing down his kids' throats, Seely said, he gives them small tastes of what it takes to manage the two custodial accounts he opened for them. Seely buys the stock, and on a regular but not-too-frequent basis he sits down with his sons, ages 10 and 12, and explains how it all works.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54813,00.html

A Theory of Evolution, for Robots
If you can't program a robot to fly, then program it so it will figure out how to fly without your help. Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin, two scientists at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, have designed a winged robot capable of learning flight techniques. What they've come up with is a robot equipped with small motors allowing it to manipulate its meter-long, balsa-wood wings in different directions. A computer program feeds the robot random instructions, which let it develop the concept of liftoff on its own. But it remains only a concept; it hasn't gone anywhere yet. Still, no one is complaining.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,54900,00.html

Bertelsmann Boss Faces the Music
Bertelsmann's new boss has taken just six weeks to kill off some of the wilder ventures in his far-flung media empire, but kicking what remains into shape will be a far greater challenge. By undoing ousted CEO Thomas Middelhoff's handiwork, Gunter Thielen is demolishing his predecessor's centralized management, exiting e-commerce headache BOL and leaving behind the ultimate problem child -- maverick music service Napster.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54959,00.html

Hey Buddy, PayPal Me a Quarter?
Next time you have a few bucks to spare, how about giving it to a woman who needs cash to divorce her husband? Or the theater student who wants to make films "in the tradition of Jackass," MTV's raunchy stunt/comedy show? Proving that P.T. Barnum's theory holds true, a growing number of tech-savvy debtors are taking their sob stories to the Web -- and it's working. "If I were to leave my husband now, I would be unable to support my daughters," states the FAQ at helpmeleavemyhusband.com. Penny, who declined to give her last name, built the site in August after she heard about Brooklyn resident Karyn Bosnak's savekaryn.com. Since savekaryn.com went online in July, visitors have donated $9,700 toward paying off Bosnak's stack of Prada and BCBG-induced bills.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54929,00.html

A Story Of Piracy And Privacy
The recording industry and the nation's largest telephone company are crossing legal swords in what could be a test case of how far big record labels can go to track down computer users who swap music online. The industry is seeking to force Verizon Communications Corp., which also provides customers with high-speed Internet access, to turn over the name of one of its users who the record labels claim has made copyrighted music available for download by others. The Recording Industry of America also demanded that Verizon block access to the user's music files. The industry contends that it is losing millions of dollars in music sales because potential customers are instead downloading digital copies from others in violation of copyright law. The battle with Verizon is part of an aggressive campaign by the record labels on Capitol Hill, at the Justice Department and in the courts to crack down on the practice.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2002Sep4.html

Britain 'leads way' in eroding privacy
Individual privacy is being eroded in Britain to a far greater extent than in other developed countries, according to an international study of state surveillance in the year since September 11. Many states have rushed through restrictive anti-terrorism and security laws in response to last year’s terrorist attacks, but the Blair Government is singled out for an anti-privacy “pathology” that the report claims is leading to mass surveillance of the population. In the 400-page report, to be published tomorrow, Privacy International, a London-based campaign group, and the US Electronic Privacy Information Center, give warning of a significant loss of personal freedom. The Privacy and Human Rights survey notes that in many of the 53 countries studied, communications surveillance has grown, intrusive “personal profiling” of individuals has increased, and data protection laws have been watered down.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...404768,00.html

U.S. Uses Internet/Satellite Images to State its Case Against Iraq
The Bush Administration's attempt to build the case - at home and abroad - to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein includes the use of high-resolution satellite photos. An Internet web site run by the U.S. Department of State and established in the waning days of the Clinton Administration demonstrates how shot-from-space pictures are utilized to make the point that Hussein must be replaced. Numbers of satellite pictures are used on an Internet site, produced and maintained by the U.S. Department of State's Office of International Information Programs (IIP). The IIP was created from elements of the U.S. Information Agency when it merged with the U.S. Department of State on October 1, 1999.
http://www.space.com/news/iraq_satellite_020904.html

Speed of gravity to be measured
Astronomers at the world's largest radio telescopes are gearing up to measure the speed of gravity. It is the first attempt to verify a key prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that nothing, not even the influence of gravity itself, can travel faster than light. No one has ever tested this prediction, even though the assumption that gravity travels in waves or gravitons with a finite speed underpins much of theoretical physics. The difficulty is that if light and gravity travel at the same speed, how can you hope to see evidence of gravity's speed? The answer, says Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri, Columbia, is by watching a distant quasar as the planet Jupiter moves in front of it and its gravity bends radio waves from the quasar.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992763

Small step for commercialization of Moon surface
The first private Moon landing has won government authorization. The decision opens the door to the commercialization of the Moon's surface. The US State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have granted TransOrbital, Inc. of La Jolla, California, permission to send its TrailBlazer probe to map the surface of the Moon and photograph Earth. The launch is scheduled for June 2003 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. "The Moon is ripe for commercial development," says Dennis Laurie, head of TransOrbital. "It's a lot closer than you think, at least in travel time, which is four days."
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020902/020902-8.html

Musical approach helps programmers catch bugs
Making music out of computer code is helping programmers to catch the bugs that can cause software to go awry. Computer code is often prone to errors that are difficult to spot. In a long program, made perhaps of hundreds or thousands of lines of programming language code, it is possible for the writer to misjudge how the various elements of the software will work together. So-called debugging software can iron this out, by letting people look at a graphical representation of a program. This helps find bugs by highlighting which parts of a program are communicating with others. But the computer's sound capabilities are ignored in debugging, says Paul Vickers at the University of Northumbria. "It's sitting there as a completely unused channel, while lots of effort is being put into visualisation tools." So Vickers and James Alty of Loughborough University developed a system that automatically converts computer program code written in Pascal into simple "music".
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992757

Extra-solar 'planet' an optical illusion
One of the 100 or so planets discovered orbiting stars outside the Solar System does not exist after all. Astronomers have realised that what appeared to be a Jupiter-sized planet is actually a giant sunspot rotating around the surface of the star. But they do not expect many other stars will turn out to be bogus, because this case involves a particularly young star. The phantom planet was thought to orbit HD 192262, a young star 63 light years from Earth. In 1999, at team at the University of California at Santa Cruz discovered a shift in the spectrum of light emitted by the star. They concluded that a large planet must be orbiting the star, causing the shift, and announced its discovery.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992765

Anti-Copying Company Says Blame The Music Industry Not Us
Midbar, the company that has been selling a lot of anti-copying technology to music publishers, says it is just that: a technology provider. "It's up to the labels which of the CD products they want to implement," says Midbar's v.p. of sales and marketing, Noam Zur. Consumers with complaints need to contact the music companies, not Midbar, he says. Zur wants to make sure that Midbar's technology is presented in a fair light, something he believes did not happen in a previous NewsForge article that pointed out problems with the Midbar anti-copying scheme, particularly the CDS-100, which prevents the playback of a "protected" CD on a computer CD-ROM drive -- sometimes even causing damage to the computer. He stressed the fact that the CDS-100 technology was created intentionally to prevent operation on a computer CD-ROM drive.
http://linux.com/article.pl?sid=02/09/03/1547253

The Arts After 9-11: Movies
In the nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again weeks after 9-11, Hollywood developed Sensitivity. This was a condition it was not used to, and its earnest attempts to protect the tender sensibilities of the audience were fumbling at best. The studios first act was to postpone the release of those movies it deemed glaringly inappropriate: the Schwarzenegger terrorist thriller “Collateral Damage”; the heist comedy “Big Trouble,” which featured a scene of a bomb being smuggled onto a plane, and the World War II drama “Windtalkers.” All these 2001 films have come out in 2002, and all have wilted at the box office. If their producers would like to blame their failure on world events, they are free to indulge this delusion. Every New York-based movie was scrutinized with a magnifying glass.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/800374.asp

More news later on... but you already knew it, didn't you ?

[ab-NORM-al]

i'll read this when i get home

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