The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

Virus writers get Slapper happy
Internet vandals have continued to modify the recent Slapper worm and have sent at least four new variants of the hostile Linux program into the electronic wilds. The newest variant, dubbed "Mighty," exploits the same Linux Web server flaw that other versions of the Slapper worm have used to slice through the security on vulnerable servers. Russian antivirus company Kaspersky Labs said in a release Friday that more than 1,600 servers had been infected by this latest variant as of Friday morning and are now controlled by the worm via special channels on the Internet relay chat system. "In this way, 'Mighty' is able to leak out confidential information, corrupt important data, and also use infected machines to conduct distributed (denial of service) attacks and other nasty activities," Kaspersky Labs said in the advisory.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-960887.html

Dell adds free megahertz in laptop war
Dell Computer has given away free memory, hard-drive capacity and optical drive upgrades to entice customers. Now some buyers are getting free megahertz. The Austin, Texas-based computer giant is not charging for most processor upgrades on its Latitude notebooks, which are geared toward businesses. A Latitude C840 with a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 processor and 256MB of memory, for instance, costs $2,297--but a similarly configured C840 with a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 or a 2GHz Pentium 4 can be had for the same price. The same holds true for C640 models, which are thinner but have less memory and hard drive capacity than machines in the C840 line.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-960848.html

Laptop fuel cell gets air clearance
The Department of Transportation has ruled that a new fuel cell can be taken on airplanes, partly clearing the way for commercial acceptance of this alternative to standard laptop batteries. Fuel cells, which will let notebook computers run three to 10 times longer without a recharge, had previously been banned from planes because they contain methanol, a flammable liquid. But the DOT said that a cell designed by start-up PolyFuel can ride in airplane cabins when it emerges commercially because it contains a relatively low concentration of methanol, according to Jim Balcom, PolyFuel's CEO.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-960823.html

Verizon, RIAA in copyright showdown
Attorneys for Verizon Communications and the music industry sparred in court on Friday over whether to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to order Verizon to turn over the name of a Kazaa subscriber who allegedly was sharing copies of more than 600 music recordings. U.S. District Judge John Bates did not rule on the music industry's request on Friday, but because federal law emphasizes a speedy response to such requests, Bates is expected to make a decision soon. Each side argued for 45 minutes.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-960838.html

Lindows to AOL: surely some mistake?
Lindows.com, which sells an operating system designed to compete with Windows in the consumer PC market, is sticking by its original announcement of an "AOL computer", despite AOL Time Warner's claim that the way the deal was described was "misleading". AOL last week distanced itself from the Lindows PC, saying "AOL has nothing to do with it", and saying that Lindows.com had only filled out a one-page form allowing it to distribute the Netscape 7.0 browser, something it has in common with more than 70,000 other organizations. On Thursday, however, Lindows suggested that AOL might not have its facts straight.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-960792.html

Microsoft to power up cell phones
Microsoft's wireless phone software will debut later this year in the United Kingdom, a spokesman for mobile services company Orange confirmed Friday. Orange, a division of France Telecom, will launch phones with the software before the end of the year in the U.K. and release them in other European countries in the following few months, said spokesman Stuart Jackson. However, sources close to Microsoft's product strategy said the U.K. debut could come as early as this month. Orange has 12.8 million subscribers in the U.K. and 18.6 million in France.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-960796.html

Anti-scam tech takes on thieves
U.S. retailers are increasingly turning to software to reduce the billions of dollars lost to theft and various scams each year. A typical heist goes like this: A customer walks up to a cash register with three items and is asked to write a check for the total, $17.59. The cashier scans all three items, but secretly voids the last item, which costs $7.59. The customer hands over a check for $17.59 and leaves with the items. Later, the cashier takes $7.59 out of the till and pockets it. The end result: The customer walks away thinking the goods are paid for, and the cash register total shows no discrepancies. But the store is out both $7.59 and the item that was never paid for.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-960710.html?tag=fd_lede

Liquid Audio proxy count challenged
A week after Liquid Audio shareholders apparently voted to oust key members of the board of directors, last-minute maneuvers continue to cloud the future of the once-prominent digital music company. According to a dissident shareholder group seeking to replace Liquid's board, more than 80 percent of shareholders last week voted for a new slate of directors. Liquid, however, is challenging the vote and calling for a review of the voting process. Complicating matters is a deal announced Monday, several days after the vote, to sell Liquid Audio's slate of digital music technology patents to Microsoft for $7 million.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-960903.html?tag=fd_top

Night owls boost online spending
Internet shopping has captured a new "out-of-hours" market which is claiming an ever greater proportion of UK retail spending, a report said. Research from Barclaycard suggested that one third of all online sales were made between 6pm and 9am. The rise in twilight shopping is part of the increasing popularity of online or e-shopping, estimated to be growing by 90% a year in the UK. The increase contrasts sharply with the plight of more traditional High Street shopping, which economists warned this week was showing weak growth.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2298699.stm

Red light runners can e-mail judge
A Washington county court system is experimenting with a new plan that lets traffic scofflaws communicate with a judge via e-mail instead of in person. To participate in the new Yakima County program, people who receive traffic tickets must admit they violated the law. But they can explain their situation via e-mail and ask for a reduced fine or permission to participate in traffic school without having to wait for a couple of hours to make their case in court. The judge considers their e-mail request and then mails them the decision on a postcard. The system, made public last week and suggested by a judge who hears such cases, is only for transgressions such as running a red light or speeding. Those convicted of offenses such as drunk driving must still show up in court.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-960817.html?tag=cd_mh

Busboy pleads guilty to ID theft
A 32-year-old restaurant busboy pleaded guilty on Thursday to pilfering personal and financial data belonging to America's rich and famous, including billionaire Warren Buffett. Abraham Abdallah, a high-school dropout, entered his guilty plea in response to a 12-count indictment charging him with wire, mail and credit card fraud, identity theft and conspiracy -- in what authorities believe is the largest identity theft in Internet history. The federal case accuses Abdallah of using the information as part of a scheme to steal more than $80 million from individuals, corporations and financial institutions. Although he pleaded guilty, Abdallah told U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska he was not driven by greed.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-960754.html?tag=cd_mh

Congress asked to unpick copy lock laws
A proposal to defang a controversial copyright law became public on Thursday, after more than a year of anticipation and months of closed-door negotiations with potential supporters. Formally titled the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, the new bill represents the boldest counterattack yet on recent expansions of copyright law that have been driven by entertainment industry firms worried about Internet piracy. The bill, introduced by Reps. Rick Boucher, D-Va., and John Doolittle, R-Calif., would repeal key sections of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It would also require anyone selling copy-protected CDs to include a "prominent and plainly legible" notice that the discs include anti-piracy technology that could render them unreadable on some players.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-960731.html?tag=cd_mh

MTV producing movie on Napster founder
Napster founder Shawn Fanning is taking his story to the small screen. MTV said it's struck a deal with the peer-to-peer wunderkind for the rights to Fanning's life story. The tale of Napster's rise and fall is full of the ready-made drama that directors are eager to capture. A spokeswoman for MTV said the movie would focus on Fanning's personal saga as he transformed from an obscure college student into a symbol of the freewheeling Internet boom. Fanning developed Napster while a student at Northeastern University, dropped out of school to start a business based on the program, and then incurred the wrath of record companies, which sued him for aiding copyright infringement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-960717.html?tag=cd_mh

Senate gets ready to stream hearings
Digital video provider Virage on Thursday said the U.S. Senate will use its technology to record and stream daily proceedings for a pending video-on-demand service. The deal comes as the Senate is converting its internal video system to high-definition television (HDTV) in a deal with digital systems integrator TGS -- a switch mirrored in a mandated rollover for U.S. television broadcasters to digital formats by December 2006. Terms of the contract were not disclosed. San Mateo, Calif.-based Virage said the system will create a high-definition video-on-demand service that will provide lawmakers with better opportunities to observe and respond to the statements of their colleagues, among other things.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-960695.html?tag=cd_mh

Bill would circumvent foreign censors
A new bill designed to fight foreign Web censorship has been introduced in Congress. The legislation, unveiled Wednesday by Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., would create an Office of Global Internet Freedom charged with fighting Internet blocking and helping Web users in countries such as China and Syria get around censorship efforts and avoid punishment. The bill also would allocate $50 million each year over the next two years to develop and promote anti-blocking technology. "Just as past governments have banned pamphlets, jammed radios and committed their gravest atrocities out of the range of TV cameras, many governments are attempting to restrict an individual's freedom to receive and exchange information by blocking the Internet," Cox said in a statement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-960679.html?tag=cd_mh

Free download day a hit with fans
British and Irish music fans scrambled for a piece of the action on Thursday as some of the music business' heavyweights opened up their archives for free downloads in a bid to combat Internet piracy. But "Digital Download Day" -- part counterstrike, part marketing ploy -- proved almost too successful as the host Internet site slowed to a near-standstill under the sheer weight of surfers trying to claim their download "voucher." Devised by OD2, a technology company specializing in music distribution and co-founded by recording artist Peter Gabriel, the "Day" is in fact a weeklong venture offering access to 100,000 tracks from 6,000 artists including ColdPlay, Dido and Elvis Presley.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-960650.html?tag=cd_mh

Gamers cash in at jackpot sites
Dion calculates she won more than $250,000 last year playing solitaire and a few other games on WorldWinner. Subtracting the entry fees WorldWinner and other sites charge to cover costs and build jackpots, she cleared more than $100,000 -- not bad for a job that offers flexible hours, work-at-home convenience and more suspense than the average accounting assignment. While most players don't come close to Dion's take, sites such as WorldWinner -- dubbed "skill-based gaming" to distinguish themselves from gambling sites -- are attracting a growing audience and interest from segments of the big, but profit-challenged, online game industry.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-960738.html?tag=cd_mh

Microsoft zaps Xbox-hacking chipmaker
Microsoft appears to have shut down one of the world's largest distributors of "mod chips" -- gray-market add-ons that allow Microsoft's Xbox and other video game consoles to play pirated games. A representative in Microsoft's Australian subsidiary confirmed that the company has taken legal action against Hong Kong-based Lik Sang. Lik Sang's Web site has been offline for nearly two weeks, with a notice on the site blaming a server outage. Lik Sang representatives could not be reached for comment, and Microsoft attorneys were unavailable to explain the exact nature of the legal action.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-960594.html?tag=cd_mh

Prosecutors subpoena digital TV firm
News Corp.'s NDS Group, which makes encrypted smart cards for digital TV systems, said on Thursday it has received subpoenas for documents from the U.S. Attorney's office in San Diego, California. The company said the federal investigation involves allegations similar to those made earlier this year that charged NDS with hacking a competitor's system. Asked about the nature of the documents subpoenaed, an NDS spokeswoman declined further comment. Vivendi Universal's Canal Plus unit sued Britain's NDS for $1 billion in March, alleging that the company broke into its security system and then posted onto the Internet the security code that ensures only authorized customers have access to pay-TV.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-960750.html?tag=cd_mh

How and Why the Internet Broke
The Internet was very confused on Thursday. But cyberspace hasn't gone senile. Those massive e-mail delays, slow Internet connections and downed e-businesses were all caused by a software upgrade that went horribly wrong at WorldCom's UUNet division, a large provider of network communications. The problem affected roughly 20 percent of UUNet's U.S. customers -- which translates to millions of users across the United States and around the world -- for most of Thursday, according to WorldCom spokeswoman Jennifer Baker.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55580,00.html

Bill: Copyright Power to People
With talk of preemptive war all the rage on Capitol Hill, it seems that such posturing has extended into the world of digital copyright law. On Thursday Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Rep. John Doolittle (D-Calif.) introduced the Digital Media Consumers Rights Act to preserve specific fair-use rights to copy digital works as well as "circumvention" rights to bypass copy protections. With no chance of passage this year, the bill's introduction prepares the ground for battle in the next session of Congress. Supporters are an unlikely coalition of electronics and computer interests, consumer groups and academics. "It's just time," said a beaming Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association. "Consumers have been pushed up against the ropes. This is the first time in 20 years in which consumers are going on the offense rather than on the defense."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55569,00.html

Hackware Author Arrested -- Maybe
When Scotland Yard jubilantly announced the arrest of a London-based malware author nicknamed Torner last month, most Internet users probably drew a blank. After all, Torner's Linux-based Tornkit hacking program was hardly in the same league as Melissa or Love Bug, the mainstream Windows worms created by David Smith and Onel de Guzman, respectively. But to Teresa Hall and a group of other system administrators and Internet users, Torner was public enemy No. 1.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55515,00.html

Artists Trade Oils for Inkjets
Anyone with a word processor and a dot-matrix printer can do a recognizable portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in ASCII text. The more ambitious can move up to Adobe Photoshop and a $5,000 Epson Stylus Pro. Either way, suggests jet_seT, an exhibition at the University of Texas at Dallas, the final step in the creation of a work is the same: Send to printer. Digital artists use an array of image-processing software, with printers being the last, crucial step. If the printer isn't up to the job, then all the work is wasted.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55525,00.html

Space probe kit will fight terrestrial crime
Technology inspired by a NASA space probe will soon be helping detectives solve gun crimes and murder cases far faster. A simple handheld device that instantly confirms whether a suspect has recently fired a gun means lab delays will not allow suspects time to get away. The idea for the device was hatched under a new collaboration between NASA and the US National Institute of Justice. The plan is to adapt taxpayer-funded space research to fight terrestrial crime. Jacob Trombka, a physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, set the ball rolling. He believes X-ray fluorescence (XRF) could be a key crime-fighting technology. It was used by NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) probe, which touched down on the asteroid Eros in February 2001.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992869

Sputnik 1: The Satellite That Started It All
Sounding more like a mechanical cricket chirping from high above, it was the beep heard 'round the world. Forty-five years ago today, the former Soviet Union lofted the world's first artificial satellite of Earth: Sputnik 1. The basketball-sized spacecraft weighed some 184 pounds (84-kilograms) and whipped about the globe every 98 minutes. And with every orbit, Sputnik 1 thumbed its nose at America's technological prowess, political esteem in the community of nations, as well as U.S. military strength. This Soviet satellite was the true starting gun for the "space race", a launch that also led directly to the creation of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...ry_021004.html

Scheme hides Web access
The ringing declaration that information wants to be free often bounces off a hard reality -- the free flow of information can attract interference. The reality online is that censorship and surveillance are widespread and growing. The everyday flow of ordinary Internet traffic, however, could provide cover for political dissidents, whistleblowers, or anyone else who wants to access censored information online without the activity being recorded or blocked by others. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a scheme that could guarantee users access to data in such a way that their actions could not be monitored.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/1...ss_100202.html

What does the Internet look like
Few questions are simultaneously so baffling and so significant as: “what is the structure of the Internet?” Baffling, because the thing has grown without any planning or central organisation. Significant, because knowing how the routing computers that are the net's physical embodiment are interconnected is vital if it is to be used properly. At the latest count, there were 228,265 of these routers around the world. They direct the packets of data that make up Internet traffic. Any effort to map the Internet is necessarily incomplete and out of date the moment it appears. Instead, Albert-Laslo Barabasi and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, treat the net as though it were a natural phenomenon. What scientists generally do with a natural phenomenon that they do not understand is to build a model of it. Dr Barabasi's latest paper on the matter, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a general framework for improving the accuracy of Internet models.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=1365118

More news later on

[multi]

good stories of news again WT..
nearly missed them !
i still reckon the news should be sticky untill the next day or till it gets moved...
any way thanx again

[TankGirl]

Hiya WT and thanks for the news!

Originally posted by walktalker
What does the Internet look like
Few questions are simultaneously so baffling and so significant as: “what is the structure of the Internet?” Baffling, because the thing has grown without any planning or central organisation. Significant, because knowing how the routing computers that are the net's physical embodiment are interconnected is vital if it is to be used properly. At the latest count, there were 228,265 of these routers around the world. They direct the packets of data that make up Internet traffic. Any effort to map the Internet is necessarily incomplete and out of date the moment it appears. Instead, Albert-Laslo Barabasi and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, treat the net as though it were a natural phenomenon. What scientists generally do with a natural phenomenon that they do not understand is to build a model of it. Dr Barabasi's latest paper on the matter, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a general framework for improving the accuracy of Internet models.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=1365118

A good story and a fresh, interesting perspective to understanding Internet dynamics!

- tg