The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

Damn, I had a lot of sleep to catch on this week...

Judge backs MS-DOJ settlement
A federal judge Friday largely accepted a proposed settlement in Microsoft's long-running antitrust case with the U.S. Justice Department. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said sanctions against the software giant are to last five years unless extended by the court. "The court is satisfied that the parties have reached a settlement which comports with the public interest," Kollar-Kotelly wrote. The settlement "is conditionally approved as the final judgment in this case," the judge wrote. The settling parties have until Nov. 8 to refile the settlement with changes requested by the judge.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-964278.html

Microsoft attacks spam in new Outlook
Microsoft is taking spam fighting more seriously in the next version of its widely used Outlook e-mail and contact-management software. Outlook 11 will, by default, no longer grab data such as images from outside servers when previewing e-mail formatted like Web pages. The ability to send and receive e-mail formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was at one time touted as a feature in Microsoft's e-mail programs. "We've taken a step backward, so to speak, by blocking external content when you preview e-mail," Simon Marks, Office XP product manager, said this week. Marks described the new feature as an important spam-fighting tool.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-964166.html

Gateway steps up with a $399 PC
Amid fears that consumers won't be shelling out for high-ticket items this holiday season, PC makers are lowering prices to try and loosen consumers' purse strings. Gateway on Friday became the latest PC maker to offer a $399 PC, selling its 300S model for that price -- sans monitor -- after a $100 rebate. Gateway joins Hewlett-Packard and eMachines, which also offer $399 PCs. Poway, Calif.-based Gateway plans to tout the desktop as part of a new ad campaign that starts Friday, built around the new "A better way" theme and highlighting Gateway's push into digital electronics. Gateway's ad will also feature the 42-inch plasma screen TV that will be formally announced Monday. As earlier reported, the model will sell for just under $3,000, which analysts say will make it the lowest-priced plasma-based television on the market.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-964238.html

Bugbear worst virus in October
A variant of the Bugbear worm was the most widespread bit of malware in October, according to statistics released yesterday by Sophos Anti-Virus. Bugbear-A displaced Klez-H at the top of the virus list last month, although the latter is still causing serious problems. Natasha Staley, anti-virus consultant, Sophos Anti-Virus, said: "After seven months at the top, Klez-H has finally been knocked off its perch by the Bugbear worm. Bugbear is a box of tricks that not only spreads via email and network shares but can also log the victim's keystrokes - allowing hackers to monitor everything a user types from passwords to bank account details."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-964197.html

I need to reboot...

[VWguy]

Cops Probe Death of Jam Master Jay

NEW YORK — Police investigated Friday whether a feud sparked the fatal shooting of hip-hop legend Jam Master Jay, even as skeptical friends and family mourned the beloved music pioneer from Run-DMC.

"There's no reason," the victim's teenage son, Jason Mizell Jr., said Thursday. "He didn't really do anything wrong."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,67147,00.html


Debt Collectors May Subcontract for IRS

LOS ANGELES — As always, the tax man cometh, but he soon might not be government issue.

Uncle Sam collects roughly $2 trillion in taxes every year, but an additional $220 billion never gets paid. The Treasury Department believes it could collect a good chunk of that money if it went after deadbeat taxpayers more aggressively. The question is: Who should make those calls?

Private debt-collecting firms like Allied Interstate are hoping the government will hire them to do the job they say they can do better than anyone.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,68639,00.html

Mall Owners Prosper Despite Retail Weakness

NEW YORK — As the holiday selling season approaches, mall owners are seeing green, even as their retailer tenants see red.
While retailers brace for what could be another weak holiday shopping season and blame slumping sales, in part, on fewer people visiting malls, landlords are insulated by locked-in, long-term lease agreements with the stores.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,68768,00.html

Smokers Fined for Lighting Up in Tokyo Streets

TOKYO (Reuters) - Lighting up on Tokyo's streets became hazardous to more than health on Friday as the first luckless Japanese were fined for smoking in some downtown areas.
Smoking on the street was banned in busy parts of central Tokyo's Chiyoda ward a month ago, but a system of fines--up to $163 for multiple offences--began on November 1.
http://www.reuters.com/news_article....toryID=1670066

Singer Barry White Planning for Kidney Transplant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Soul singer Barry White, battling kidney failure, is resting comfortably while doctors conduct tests to find a suitable transplant donor among his eight children, a spokesman said on Thursday.
The 58-year-old entertainer was hospitalized last month for kidney dialysis, but he is now at home and undergoing dialysis ever other day on an out-patient basis as his condition improves, White's manager, Ned Shanker, told Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/news_article....toryID=1670089

A little help to take the pressure off.

[walktalker]

My life has been rebooted

Europe's cyber-cops: We've lost the battle
Europe is losing out in its fight against cybercrime, a top law enforcement official said Friday. "With cybercrime, it's become so obvious that we've lost the battle even before we've begun to fight. We can't keep up," Rolf Hegel, head of Europol's serious crime department, told the Compsec 2002 computer security conference here. The broad threat of cybercrime has puzzled police forces around the world for years. And now there is mounting evidence that organized criminal groups are using new technologies to commit everyday crimes and some new ones.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-964187.html

MS adds video editing to Windows XP
Microsoft will add a video-editing feature to its Windows XP operating system with a new program that automates and simplifies home movie-making, the software maker said Friday. Movie Maker 2, whose beta, or test version, which will be available for download on Microsoft's Web site on Friday, is meant to dispel the notion that home video-editing takes hours and requires a lot of learning, said Michael Aldridge, lead product manager at Microsoft's digital media division. The new program, which will be available for free as part of the Windows XP license, automatically pulls video from a camcorder, analyzes clips and assembles a short movie set to music with titles and credits.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-964173.html

Windows VPN software allows attacks
Windows 2000 and Windows XP servers can be attacked through the software ordinarily used to create secure connections to remote workers, Microsoft said on Wednesday. A buffer overflow in the implementation of Point to Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) in the two operating systems allows attackers to cause any Windows 2000 or Windows XP servers to crash. Microsoft also warned of a bug in Windows 2000 that could allow an attacker to sabotage the system via a Trojan horse. The PPTP bug, which received a "critical" rating from Microsoft, affects both servers and clients, but the client attack is more difficult to carry out. Microsoft said that attackers could feed specially-formed control data to the part of the PPTP software that connects and disconnects PPTP sessions, which would corrupt the system core memory, causing the system to fail. Any server that offers PPTP, or a workstation manually configured to offer PPTP, is affected.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-964057.html

Week in review: Access restricted
Ideally, technology is supposed to be about helping individuals do more, but sometimes it's also about getting people to spend more. Microsoft confirmed this week that the next version of Office will run only on the latest versions of its operating systems: Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 and Windows XP. Early participants in beta testing of Office 11 found that they had been dropped from the program if they had planned to use older versions such as Windows 98, 98 Second Edition, Me or NT. Limiting access to the final version of Office 11 could encourage users of older operating systems to upgrade, but it could also further erode relations between Microsoft and business customers already stung by increases in volume licensing fees.
http://news.com.com/2100-1069-964167...g=fd_lede2_hed

IM compatibility closer to reality
The Internet's governing technical body quietly gave its stamp of approval Thursday to a group intent on creating an open standard for instant messaging. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the group that sets the technical standards for the Internet, gave the go-ahead to the creators of open-source instant-messaging application Jabber to create a working group based on that technology. These such groups plan the specific implementations of the technologies that make up the Internet. A representative of the new working group wasn't immediately available for comment.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964317.html?tag=fd_top

Is Microsoft losing ground to Linux?
Open-source software gave Microsoft a one-two punch this week, with the European Union and an African nonprofit educational organization showing preference for Linux systems. The European Union awarded on Thursday a $249,000 (250,000 euro) contract to U.K.-based system-integrator Netproject to study the feasibility of moving the information systems of several member countries' governments to the Linux operating system from Microsoft's Windows OS. Microsoft's expensive licensing terms and its push for customers to speed their software upgrade cycles are driving the European Union's interest in open-source solutions, said Eddie Bleasdale, Netproject's CEO. Describing a meeting with representatives from several EU member countries, Bleasdale said Microsoft's current licensing terms had governments looking for other options.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-964310.html?tag=fd_top

Report: Don't overspend on technology
A new research report suggests that companies can't outperform their competitors simply by outspending them on technology. Companies that spent the most on technology during 2001 didn't necessarily perform the best in their industries, according to a survey conducted by Forrester Research. Instead, the best results went to those that more carefully considered their technology spending. Forrester surveyed nearly 300 companies about their performance in terms of revenue growth, return on assets (otherwise known as return on investment) and cash-flow growth over a three-year period, ranking them with a rating system of one to four stars. The firm found that four-star companies spent only slightly more than one-star companies on technology, but outperformed their higher-spending competitors in all three areas.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-964213.html?tag=fd_top

Court chains Aimster's melodies
A U.S. District Court judge has agreed to the terms of a preliminary injunction outlined by the recording industry to halt the swapping of music files on Aimster. The decision, announced Thursday, marked another legal victory for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The industry group has been waging a relentless battle against online person-to-person file-sharing networks -- most notably Napster -- that allow people to download copyrighted songs for free. The order from Judge Marvin Aspen of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois will force Aimster -- also known as Madster -- to implement technologies to prevent people from uploading or downloading copyrighted works. If it is unable to meet the terms, Aimster will be forced to shut down.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964212.html?tag=fd_top

Who’s in Control Here?
Organizations, especially for-profit organizations, now play a curiously dual role in promoting the unfettered acceleration of technology. They are technology’s most powerful driver and also its hogtied prisoner. That combination generates more and more acceleration, with potentially disastrous downside effects.
http://www-gsb.stanford.edu/communit...e_leavitt.html

New worm aims to infest Australian systems
An Internet worm, posing as an anti-virus update arriving in an email, is also using peer to peer (p2p) software to spread. The Merkur worm, aka W32.HLLW.Merkur@mm arrives in email form with the subject "Update your Anti-virus Software" and has an attachment named "Taskman.exe". The worm relies solely on the recipient being fooled into running the attachment to spread. Like similar worms that have used "social engineering" to lure in unsuspecting victims, the Merkur worm sends itself to everyone in the victims' address book when it is opened. The also worm deletes any multimedia files located in p2p file sharing directories. It targets share directories used by KaZaA, Bearshare and eDonkey software.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/sec...0269585,00.htm

Natural Art Goes Digital
Andy Goldsworthy is an artist much more identified with the organic than the virtual -- he's the last person you'd come close to labeling a computer artist. Yet his exhibition at San Francisco's Haines Gallery, "Work from Scotland for San Francisco," is a Net-reliant endeavor that puts him in the role of cyber artist -- at least for the moment. The digital conceit is this: For every day during the duration of the show -- which runs through Nov. 30, including Sundays and Mondays, when the gallery is closed -- Goldsworthy is making new pieces in the environs of his hometown of Penpont, Scotland, and e-mailing a digital image or two, along with an accompanying diary entry, to the gallery. These pictures are then printed out on a consumer-model Epson printer and mounted on the empty gallery walls daily. The same material is being e-mailed to 150 or so curators, collectors, critics and Goldsworthy fans. By the end of the exhibition, the sizable white walls at Haines will likely be abundantly full, as will those lucky recipients' e-mail boxes.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/cultural/

Gates's Pen vs. the Keyboard
For years, William H. Gates III and Warren E. Buffett have routinely mailed each other magazine articles that have caught their eye. They rip pieces out of the magazines, jot notes in the margins, and pop them in the mail. Gates anticipates the day when he won't have to mess with all that. With his new Tablet PC, he plans to call up articles from the Web, scrawl thoughts on the screen with a digital pen, and shoot it off to Buffett via e-mail. He's already using an early version of tablet software to send electronically annotated articles to Microsoft colleagues. "I have anticipated this for many, many years. And here it is," says Gates.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...02111_7927.htm

Software heals systems while they work
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University said they have developed software that can repair a database that has been attacked, even as it continues to process transactions. Scientists at the Cyber Security Group at Penn State's School of Information Sciences and Technology said the software can quarantine malicious commands sent to database management programs as it simultaneously repairs any damage done to the system. The new software can be adapted for static repairs or for on-the-fly fixes that can unwind a chain of corrupted commands while the database continues to process transactions, researchers said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-964109.html

Software piracy dips in some states
An industry group representing the world's largest software makers on Thursday named California, New York and Utah among the states with the greatest drop in piracy rates for business software. The study conducted for the Business Software Alliance noted, however, that overall piracy rates inched higher from 2000 to 2001. Twenty-five percent of business software in use in the United States was pirated in 2001 -- up 1 percentage point from the previous year, according the alliance's research. The study also quantified the damage to the software industry and the national economy from continued software piracy, asserting that in 2001 it cost the United States $1.8 billion in retail sales of business software and more than 111,000 jobs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-964059.html?tag=cd_mh

Wi-Fi getting new security standard
Major manufacturers of wireless networking products announced support Thursday for a new standard intended to shore up security for the increasingly popular Wi-Fi networking technology. Among those backing the new security protocols are chipmakers Intersil, Texas Instruments and Proxim. Texas Instruments intends to ship a set of Wi-Fi chips in the coming weeks that will have the new security measures inside, said Bill Carney, director of business development for TI's wireless networking business.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-964046.html

Does search engine's power threaten Web's independence?
Patrick Ahern has witnessed the power of Google -- and the difficulties of trying to do business without it. Data Recovery Group, where he is president, would typically come up around the fourth listing on Google's popular search engine last year. Then in January, when Google removed the company from its listings without explanation, Data Recovery saw a 30 percent drop in business. "When you're No. 4 that plays well; when you fall off, you tend to lose phone traffic. And if you don't have the right relationship with Google to find out what you could have done wrong, you're out of luck," Ahern said, noting that this can have a dangerous domino effect. "If you're not ranked in Google, Yahoo won't list you. It's incestuous." In the dot-com shakeout, Google has not only survived but reigns supreme.
http://news.com.com/2009-1023-963618.html

ICANN approves election reform plan
Directors of a key Internet oversight body voted Thursday to abandon the online elections that were originally supposed to seat half of its board, opting instead to select leadership through an appointment process. Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, voted 15-3 at a quarterly meeting in Shanghai, China, to adopt a comprehensive reform plan they hope will put to rest long-standing questions about how the group should function and who it should represent. But the new scheme is unlikely to satisfy ICANN's many critics, who say it will further insulate intellectual-property lawyers, Internet infrastructure companies and other ICANN insiders from the world's 550 million Internet users.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964091.html?tag=cd_mh

Digital copyright law on trial
A security researcher asked a federal judge Wednesday to let a challenge to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act continue. Attorneys for Ben Edelman, who specializes in investigating flaws in blocking software, filed a 26-page document arguing that his work is imperiled by legal threats from N2H2, a filtering company based in Seattle. N2H2 has asked a Massachusetts judge to dismiss the case, which the American Civil Liberties Union brought in July to let Edelman create and distribute a utility that decrypts N2H2's secret list of forbidden Web sites. The ACLU wants a court to declare that Edelman's research is not barred by the DMCA, by N2H2's shrinkwrap license, trade secret laws or other copyright laws.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963975.html?tag=cd_mh

Yahoo shifts to open-source scripting
With an eye toward its bottom line, Yahoo has decided to jettison its own proprietary scripting language in favor of the open-source alternative PHP. The scripting switch will affect the way Yahoo creates a wide array of features and functions, from serving advertisements to designing applications like its calendar and e-mail applications. While Yahoo won't rewrite pages that currently use the proprietary language, the shift will ultimately affect virtually every Yahoo page and reflects a broader development philosophy toward open-source technologies.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963937.html?tag=cd_mh

Anti-porn law back in court
Congress' most recent attempt to restrict sexual material on the Internet is on trial. Again. This week, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia heard arguments for the second time in a lawsuit challenging the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). The appeals court had originally overturned the 1998 law, but the case made its way to the Supreme Court. Last May, the high court ruled it was not ready to hear the challenge to COPA and sent it back to Philadelphia for additional proceedings, leaving in place, however, a preliminary injunction prohibiting enforcement of the law. During 45 minutes of oral arguments Tuesday, the three-judge panel in Philadelphia seemed inclined to strike down the law again, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963930.html?tag=cd_mh

Court helps out cable TV pirates
A father-and-son pair of cable TV pirates violated the law but a $30 million judgment against them should be reduced, an appeals court said Tuesday. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 15-page decision that the two Chicago-area men were denied crucial information during their trial that could have helped their defense. A three-judge panel said that Cablevision, which brought the suit against Frank Redisi Sr. and Frank Redisi Jr., should have made its chief of security available for depositions. The Redisis argued that because Cablevision waited until May 1999 to sue them, the two-year statute of limitations had expired and the lawsuit should be dismissed.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963884.html?tag=cd_mh

EMI, Audible Magic ink anti-piracy deal
EMI Recorded Music on Tuesday agreed to use audio fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic to identify and track licensed and unlicensed online usage of its song catalog. Audible Magic's technology aims to get around the problem of matching digital copies of songs that do not use a universal naming convention or format. Audio fingerprinting captures characteristics of a song that can be compared to files found on peer-to-peer networks and elsewhere regardless of the file name or type. The companies said they expect to begin implementing an audio fingerprint system by the end of the year.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963756.html?tag=cd_mh

Group extends MPEG-4 patent deadline
A key MPEG-4 licensing clearinghouse said Tuesday that it has extended the deadline for patent submissions related to a highly anticipated video compression standard. The new compression format, or codec, is part of the upcoming MPEG-4 (Moving Picture Experts Group) multimedia standard. MPEG LA had hoped to get the licensing ball rolling by Oct. 11, in advance of the final draft approval for the technology, known both as H.264 and as the JVT/AVC. But the group extended the deadline for submissions until Jan. 31, 2003, saying it will allow patent holders more time to prepare.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963792.html?tag=cd_mh

Display start-up projects new image
Display start-up Iridigm wants to project a low-power image for portable device makers. The San Francisco-based company has developed a new reflective screen technology using a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) device that the company calls "Interferometric Modulator," or "iMoD." The device could boost screen brightness to three times that of market-leading liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), while consuming less power in portable devices, according to the company. Iridigm is one of many companies angling to take share of the multibillion-dollar display market away from the LCD makers that dominate it. The competition from other hopefuls may be the start-up's biggest obstacle, said Kimberly Allen, an analyst with research firm iSuppli/Stanford Resources.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-964095.html?tag=cd_mh