The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Mars Society Boldly Goes to Oz
Rock-strewn craters, dry river beds, pancake-flat deserts -- in many ways the Australian Outback looks more like Mars than Earth. With this in mind, a convoy of Mars Society researchers is crisscrossing the Outback, looking for a place to establish a research base to prepare for manned space missions to the Red Planet. "Nowhere on Earth is perfectly analogous to Mars," said James Waldie, an aerospace engineering PhD from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48176,00.html

The Trouble With Harry Potter
For almost three years, Harry Potter books have topped both best-seller lists and the American Library Association's list of challenged and banned books. Conservative Christians, who charge that the series is a satanic tract designed to lure young readers to the occult by glorifying witchcraft, have campaigned to pull the books from schools in several states. At the same time, Friday's cinematic debut of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is expected to spark a huge turnout at movie theaters nationwide.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48396,00.html

Brit Judge Opens Up Clone Studies
A judge ruled Thursday that Britain has no laws governing human cloning, despite Parliament's attempt this year to regulate research under an existing law. In a global first, Parliament passed regulations in January under a 1990 act to permit cloning to create embryos for stem cell research. The regulations were attacked in court by anti-abortion campaigners, who fear cloning may be used for human reproduction. But the effect of their victory is to leave scientists free to continue research, unfettered by any regulation.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,48447,00.html

E-Mail Virus Slams Muslim Group
Executives at the American Muslim Council are mad as hell. Last Friday, on the Muslim Sabbath and on the cusp of the holy month of Ramadan, the council's e-mail list was infected with the malicious "Snow White" virus. The council, in a press release, described the infection as a "criminal invasion" by "hackers" in "a deliberate attempt to discredit and to disable e-mail communications to our members."
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,48412,00.html

Army Intranet: World's Largest
The United States Army has flicked the switch on the world's largest Intranet -- a giant computer network that will connect more than 1 million soldiers, support personnel and veterans all over the globe. It's called the Army Knowledge Online Portal (AKO), because it acts as a portal to hundreds of the Army's internal websites, servers and information sources. The network will have at its disposal 70 terabytes of storage. According to figures compiled by the Internet Archive, that's three times the size of the Library of Congress, the world's largest library.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,48183,00.html

Scalia: Thumbs Down on ID Card
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that if Americans were asked to vote on creating a national identification card, he would probably cast his ballot against the idea. Scalia offered remarks after a speech at the University of Missouri on Wednesday, expressing skepticism about an ID card and humorously brushing aside a question about whether anthrax jitters had reached the high court after spores were found in its mailroom. "Piece of cake. We're tough. We have to stand up to press criticism," he said, drawing laughter and applause.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,48419,00.html

Setback for Heart Patient
Artificial heart recipient Robert Tools is back on a ventilator and unable to move part of his body after he suffered a stroke, setting back months of progress and apparently dashing his wish to spend Christmas at home. Tools, 59, had the stroke Sunday at Jewish Hospital, said Dr. Laman Gray, one of the surgeons who implanted the world's first self-contained artificial heart on July 2. Dr. Robert Dowling, Tools' other surgeon, on Wednesday characterized the patient's condition as serious.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,48420,00.html

Video Games for Couch Potatoes
Hollywood and the gaming industry have crossed paths many times in the past decade, often with little success. Remember Super Mario Brothers? You can bet Disney wishes it could forget. Or how about Interplay's release of a Waterworld game two years after the movie had come out to a critical lambasting? What about the Wing Commander movie, an awful film and a box office dud? The problem of getting Hollywood and video games to complement each other is that they often come from different developers.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48338,00.html

ICANN Warned on Web Vulnerability
It would not take much for a malicious hacker to shut down the Internet, researchers at a meeting of the body that oversees Web address allocation warned on Tuesday. An attack designed to flood the Web's master directory servers with traffic "is capable of bringing down the Internet," said Paul Vixie, a speaker at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers annual meeting. After the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, ICANN pushed other agenda items aside to concentrate the discussion on ways to keep the Internet safe.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,48384,00.html

Favored Sites Vanish, But They're Easily Replaced
As the dot-com meltdown continues, many Web users are seeing favorite Web sites disappear. But Netizens are having little trouble finding new sites to browse that are just as good. And what's more, they're not having to pay anything for the luxury. These are the conclusions of a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which indicates that an estimated 12 percent, or 13 million adult U.S. Web users, have seen favored sites vanish during the dot-com bust. But most - about 62 percent - have found new sites to take the place of the dot-gones.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172217.html

Firewall Makers In Patent Infringement Dispute
Zone Labs Wednesday filed a patent infringement lawsuit against security software competitor Sygate Technologies. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Sygate infringed on a patent awarded to Zone Labs in 1999. The patent, titled "System and methodology for managing Internet access on a per application basis for client computers connected to the Internet," covers technology present in several Zone Labs products, according to president Irfan Salim.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172210.html

Irish Surfers Plan Protest Over Poor Internet Access
Faced with an ongoing lack of unmetered and broadband Internet access, Irish Internet users say they will stage a "blackout" day of protest this week. The Ireland Offline organization, formed earlier this year in response to a Esat's withdrawal of flat-rate offpeak Internet services to 2,000 users, is organizing the Nov. 16 protest, which will encourage Irish Net users to stay offline for the day.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172192.html

First '.Museum' Internet Addresses Go Live
A handful of Internet addresses ending in ".museum" went live today, marking the official launch of the world's first "sponsored" global Internet addressing code. For now, the only active addresses ending in .museum belong to the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) which operates the global .museum registry. Over the next few months, MuseDoma will gradually introduce more .museum addresses, until the organization finally begins selling .museum names early next year, according to the organization.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172191.html

FTC, DOJ To Hold Hearings On Patent Proliferation
Brian Krebs, Newsbytes. The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice will hold hearings next month to examine whether a dramatic increase in patents awarded each year has upset the balance between intellectual property and antitrust laws. Corporations and individual inventors have long relied on patent rights to profit from their ideas, and to create new products. Antitrust law, in theory, acts as a counterbalance to ensure such rights are not abused, and that consumers have access to a wide range of goods and services at competitive prices.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172186.html

EU's Antitrust Chief Hints He Will Continue Case
Microsoft Corp. may have resolved its antitrust troubles with federal authorities in the United States, but it still has to deal with someone who could turn out to be a more formidable foe -- Europe's top trustbuster, Mario Monti. The European Union's commissioner of competition signaled yesterday that the settlement Microsoft reached with the U.S. Department of Justice may not address all the issues raised on the other side of the Atlantic.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172170.html

Piracy stops Xbox in China
Microsoft's Xbox gaming console will not be sold in Hong Kong or China for the foreseeable future due to the rampant piracy problem in the region. The company is selling the actual hardware at a loss - as much as $125 per box, according to Merrill Lynch - and plans to recoup profits on its software titles, much like the razor blade or printer cartridge industry. As pirated software in many Asian regions is so widespread, it doesn't make much business sense to sell there, a Microsoft source told the South China Morning Post on Thursday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/22872.html

Nuclear warhead reduction could leave plutonium at risk
The US and Russia may have promised to take 9000 nuclear warheads out of service but they have no idea of how to dispose of the plutonium they contain, experts say. Programmes for locking the plutonium into radioactive waste or burning it in nuclear reactors are being abandoned by the Bush administration because of their high cost. The default option, storage, could leave the plutonium more vulnerable to being stolen and made into bombs by terrorists.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991568

Artists to get Web Royalties Direct
When the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) proposed SoundExchange, a new agency they set up to collect royalty fees for digital broadcasts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), artists were up in arms. They had good reason, as the original plan had the artist's record label as the conduit to disperse funds. The artist's, through two trade unions, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians, fought back and an agreement was finally worked out. Musicians and artists will now be paid directly for broadcasts of their work on cable, satellite and Web broadcasts. More important, the two sides also agreed they would share equal control of SoundExchange.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2...dexchange.html

Abandoned al-Qaida laboratory found
An abandoned compound in the heart of Kabul used by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network appears to have been a makeshift laboratory, complete with foul-smelling liquids in dirty brown jars and scattered papers covered in chemical formulas. The materials found at the compound -- deserted in haste as the Taliban fled the Afghan capital -- suggest al-Qaida may have been trying to develop chemical arms and other unconventional weapons.
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/...ory/index.html

Omar wants "extinction of America"
Defiant in the face of stunning setbacks, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar said in a radio interview Thursday that he'd rather die than join "an evil government" with Afghanistan's former leaders. "We will not accept a government of wrong-doers. We prefer death than to be a part of an evil government," Mullah Omar told the British Broadcasting Corp., dismissing a U.N. proposal for a multiethnic Afghan government.
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/...mar/index.html

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