The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

Back to work

HP-Compaq Deal not likely to scare Dell
Does the merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer scare Dell Computer? Probably not, say analysts. Although the combined company will command a whopping 81 percent of the U.S. retail PC market, the merger won't erase the problems that drove HP and Compaq to combine -- namely, that Dell can make PCs for less than either company. The merger, ideally, will make HP-Compaq more efficient by cutting duplicative costs, but Dell will likely be able to undercut that. In addition, HP will have its hands full trying to integrate two huge bureaucracies and two very different strategies for manufacturing PCs. In short, the combined company will be about as big in PCs as Dell is, but not as profitable.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Stephen Hawking: Humans will fall behind AI
Renowned British scientist Stephen Hawking has claimed that humans should be genetically engineered if they are to compete with the phenomenal growth of artificial intelligence. In an interview published on Saturday by the German magazine Focus, Professor Hawking argues that the increasing sophistication of computer technology is likely to outstrip human intelligence in the future. He concedes that the scientific modification of human genes could increase the complexity of DNA and "improve" human beings. "In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months," says Hawking. "So the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the world."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

GM to incorporate satellite radios
General Motors plans to offer XM Satellite Radio's service in more than 20 car and truck models next fall in its 2003 lineup, the two companies said Tuesday. GM's commitment marks an expansion of an agreement announced earlier this year in which the automaker said it will offer XM's satellite radio service as a factory-installed option on 2002 Cadillac DeVilles and Sevilles this fall. GM said it will announce the more than 20 models closer to introduction next year. The news comes two weeks after rival Sirius Satellite Radio said it signed a deal with BMW of North America to offer its satellite radio service to new car buyers in select BMW 3 series, 5 series and X5 vehicles.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Bertelsmann steps up CD security efforts
Israeli security company Midbar said Tuesday that it has inked a deal with a Bertelsmann-owned CD manufacturer to provide copy protection for albums. Under the agreement, Bertelsmann's Sonopress will use Midbar's technology, dubbed Cactus Data Shield, to thwart potential pirates attempting to illegally reproduce music. The technology comes in three versions. Albums containing CDS-100 can only be listened to via traditional CD players, while those with CDS-200 can be played on CD players and PCs. The third version, CDS-300, can be played on both types of devices; it also lets people download music stored on the CD to a computer hard drive.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

New e-mail worm spreading slowly
Antivirus experts have warned about a new e-mail worm that uses Microsoft Outlook to spread. "Troj_Apost.A" is a worm rather than a Trojan horse, as its name suggests. The malicious e-mail arrives with the subject line "As per your request!" with the message, "Please find attached file for your review. I look forward to hear from you again very soon. Thank you." When the attached file entitled "Readme.exe" is executed, it will try to copy itself to the floppy drive. It will then self-propagate by e-mailing itself to all addresses listed in the infected user's address book.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Big Brother Logs On
The door to paranoia opens benignly — and early. Just think of Santa. He knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good, for goodness' sake. And he knows these things all the time, even though you can't see him. Millions of kids all over the world happily and wholeheartedly believe in ubiquitous surveillance as a de facto piece of the annual Christmas present-getting machine. Parents just shake their heads in adoring wonder. But those same parents might be shocked to learn how short the journey is from the pleasant surveillance fantasy of Santa to the freedom-squashing invasion of Big Brother.
http://www.techreview.com/magazine/sep01/amato.asp

Uncle Sam using Web to find fresh faces
The Army and Navy have found a new battlefield -- both are turning to the Web in their fight to sign up new recruits. The two branches of the U.S. military are taking similar integrated approaches to online and traditional advertising by using their two TV campaigns to draw potential recruits to their online ads and their Web sites, according to a new study by Internet researcher Jupiter Media Metrix. "The Army's new campaign is created around being an army of one," said Marc Ryan, Jupiter's director of research. "They have really worked on this campaign about individualizing the army. They pointed people to the Web site to get more information...They are pushing people to the Web to make it more interesting."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Nazi crackdown turns to portals
A French judge launched hearings Tuesday into whether Internet service providers should censor portals accessible on their networks to keep French citizens from viewing links to neo-Nazi Web sites. Jean-Jacques Gomez, who last year made headlines with his controversial ruling that Yahoo must block French citizens' access to its U.S.-based auction site featuring Nazi memorabilia, is expected to make a ruling in the coming months. The case pits the companies that provide Web access against those concerned with Web content, and is seen as another test of evolving rules governing the Internet, national jurisdiction, free speech and online commerce.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Trademark law clashes with domain rights
Celebrities such as Madonna and companies such as Microsoft have already proved they have a commercial interest in protecting their names from cybersquatters who set up Web sites using their famous monikers. But what about untrademarked people and places, such as President Bush or Champagne, France? A new U.N. study says little can be done to protect such people, places or brand names because they don't have the advantage of trademark law. For now, that means the rights to Tunisia.com are owned by a U.S. company, and Afghanistan.com is based in the Caribbean.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

NEC, Sony see promise in fuel cells
Consumer electronics giants NEC and Sony assert that a battery technology they are separately developing will offer more power for portable devices. Both companies say they are working on fuel cells that can turn methanol directly into electricity and could have many times the capacity of current lithium-ion batteries. Although the basic physics is not new, both companies are turning to nanotechnology to overcome some of the issues that have thus far prevented fuel cells from becoming commercial products. The basic innovation is the use of forms of carbon called fullerenes, in which the atoms form geometric meshes that can be molded into different shapes.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[TankGirl]

May I have the first copy?

- tg

[Nicobie]

Damn. All bad news today ?

[walktalker]

Beware That Company Box You Took
Dead dot-coms are still alive in some ex-employees' computers. But these haunted hard drives harbor huge security holes instead of memories. Inexperienced home users running corporate-configured computers are a security disaster just waiting to happen, said Christopher Budd, a manager at Microsoft's Security Response Center. Many who worked for now-defunct businesses inherited or appropriated the computers they had been using at the office. These computers are typically configured for use on a corporate network protected by skilled system administrators, firewalls and other industrial-strength security measures.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46417,00.html

Pioneer Steps Out of Net Rutt
The Internet is boring, according to a prominent Internet pioneer who recently left the online world in search of more intelligent life forms. Jim Rutt has been involved in almost every significant Net-based business of the past two decades. But he now believes that the age of interesting advancements on the Internet is over ... at least for the foreseeable future. "Mostly all I see in the Internet's future are mundane business applications, ad-driven content that will drag the intelligence of the Net down to the lowest common denominator, and the ever-growing selection of mostly boring porn," Rutt said.
http://www.wired.com/news/exec/0,1370,46360,00.html

Cheating's Never Been Easier
Plagiarists have vexed school officials since the dawn of the term paper. But only recently have students been armed with what might be the ultimate cheating tool. And if the fears of university professors prove true, cheating on papers will rise significantly in the near future. "There is just so much information out there, readily accessible in an anonymous fashion, that faculty (and students) see it as a very strong temptation," said Donald L. McCabe, one of the founders of the Center for Academic Integrity. In a survey underway at the University of Virginia, faculty cited the Internet as the No. 1 societal force leading students to commit acts of plagiarism.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,45803,00.html

A Vaccine for Plants
Pesticides, a necessary evil for protecting crops, have toxic consequences, and genetically modified foods are as welcome in some quarters as the plague. It's not easy being an ecologically conscious farmer these days. But a relatively new product appears to be making inroads in the agricultural industry. Last summer Eden Bioscience of Bothell, Washington, released Messenger, a non-toxic pesticide, which like a vaccine in humans, tricks plants into defending themselves against intruders.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,45525,00.html

Young Gandhi's Crusade Is Dot-In
What would Mahatma Gandhi have thought about the Web? Probably that it was a British conspiracy. So says Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of the legendary freedom fighter, who is using the suffixes on the Internet to remind modern Indians about a forgotten concept called nationalism. Gandhi is asking Indians who are registering domains not to be colonized by dot-com or dot-org. The true Indian domain, he says, "is dot-in, so flaunt it."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46339,00.html

NASA Unveils New Robot Plane
NASA scientists on Tuesday unveiled what they called the next generation of firefighting technology: a robot plane able to circle for up to 24 hours over wildfires, beaming video images and information back to computers by satellite. The Altus II unmanned plane uses cutting edge technology usually seen in military aircraft, giving fire crews a real-time view of fires that can burn over hundreds of thousands of acres. The plane could map dozens of fires and topographical features in a day, never endangering a pilot.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,46519,00.html

Drug-Free Urine at $69 a Pee
Kenneth Curtis makes good money pissing his days away. Curtis sells his urine over the Internet to people who are skittish about using their own for workplace drug tests. Privacy Protection Services guarantees that his pee will pass even the strictest urinalysis exams. For $69 plus shipping costs, customers get 5.5 ounces of urine in a small, self-heating pouch that can be strapped onto the test-taker's body for easy concealment. And in an era where employees routinely pee into paper cups, Curtis says he has struck liquid gold. Over the past six years, he has sold over 100,000 of his "urine test substitution kits" and spawned many online competitors.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,46416,00.html

Privacy Flaw Found at Verizon Wireless Site
Verizon Wireless is leaking private information about cell phone customers who use its Web site, Newsbytes has confirmed. The privacy flaw, discovered by a Seattle software developer, enables unauthorized individuals to browse customer account information, including billing details. Using instructions posted Saturday by Marc Slemko to a security mailing list, Newsbytes was able to pull up detailed billing records of Verizon Wireless customers who use the firm's My Account service. Brian Wood, executive director of corporate communications, said Verizon Wireless is still investigating the validity and scope of the problem. "If our investigations uncover a security lapse, we will take immediate action to fix it," said Wood.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169732.html

Activists Oppose Plan To Monitor Court Employees' Net Use
The privacy and digital-rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging activists to rally against a proposal to monitor the Internet use of all federal judiciary employees. “If we can’t trust judicial employees to use computers appropriately, then we shouldn’t trust them to administer our courts,” the EFF said in an action alert urging members and supporters to join in a letter-writing campaign against the proposed policy. “Regardless of the legalities, spying on employees is bad policy, and anathema to a working environment that would otherwise attract trusted professionals and produce outstanding performance,” the EFF said.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169713.html

Teens Take Diaries to Public on Web
Today's youngsters are increasingly choosing to write them in public, on the Internet, essentially a global billboard accessible by anyone and everyone. About one out of every five teenagers ages 12 to 17 -- more than 4 million of them -- now have personal Web pages, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in the District. The sites are filled with daily logs, stories, poems, pictures and even real-time video of the authors. The coming-of-age logs of these "camgirls" and "camboys" are rewriting notions of public and private communication. Many of the teenagers believe the Internet affords them a sense of anonymity; some resent it when their parents check in.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169721.html

New Worms Seek And Destroy Code Red
Amid a debate over the ethics of fighting a virus with a virus, security researchers have separately released two programs that hunt down and patch computers infected with Code Red II. CodeGreen, written by a German security expert who uses the nickname "Der HexXer," is designed to randomly scan the Internet for servers running Microsoft's IIS software that are infected with Code Red version II. When it finds a compromised IIS machine, the worm will attempt to download and apply the patch from Microsoft, and then will close the "back doors" left by the worm. The cleaned host will then itself begin the scanning process. CRclean, according to its author, Markus Kern, is a "passively spreading worm" which only targets systems that first attack the machine on which CRclean is running.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/169707.html

Smart shooting with 3D cameras
There have been 3D camera placement problems for as long as there have been 3D games. Run a character through a building, and walls get in the way. Place characters in natural settings, and the camera gets blocked by trees and hills. As Next Generation previews editor Blake Fischer puts it, “I hope people start thinking more about the camera. We’re still stuck with the legacy of Tomb Raider and Mario 64, and no one is thinking of new solutions for camera control.” Thanks to pionnering work from Naughty Dog, the Sony-owned development house that created Crash Bandicoot, a new idea for overcoming camera problems is on the horizon — a camera that thinks for itself.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/622389.asp?0dm=C19NT

[walktalker]

This is a post whose fate is to place this thread back at the top

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
Drug-Free Urine at $69 a Pee
Kenneth Curtis makes good money pissing his days away. Curtis sells his urine over the Internet to people who are skittish about using their own for workplace drug tests. Privacy Protection Services guarantees that his pee will pass even the strictest urinalysis exams. For $69 plus shipping costs, customers get 5.5 ounces of urine in a small, self-heating pouch that can be strapped onto the test-taker's body for easy concealment. And in an era where employees routinely pee into paper cups, Curtis says he has struck liquid gold. Over the past six years, he has sold over 100,000 of his "urine test substitution kits" and spawned many online competitors.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,46416,00.html

Isn't it amazing what new business opportunities keep opening to those with a little imagination and a commercially oriented mind!

- tg