The Newspaper Shop -- Saturday edition

[walktalker]

Sun, Microsoft: Trash talking
The war of words between Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy and his counterparts at Microsoft has been raging for so long--and has become so bitter -- that it's easy to lose track of what they're fighting over. McNealy calls Microsoft the "evil empire" and the "dark side." To him, Microsoft's Outlook e-mail software is "Look Out," the virus-prone "petri dish of choice on the Internet." Internet Information Server, software for hosting Web sites and the subject of a Gartner warning, is "the Corvair of Web servers, unsafe at any speed."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-869353.html

ICANN under fire -- again
Lawmakers are calling for hearings, consumer groups are up in arms, and directors are attacking each other in increasingly nasty ways. Sounds like deja vu for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is charged with coordinating the Internet's domain name system, an international network of Internet domain servers and Web addresses. Imbroglios have upstaged the organization's role as a Net policy-maker before, although they've done little to change the way the organization works.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-871832.html

Flaws dog Microsoft, despite IE patch
Microsoft released a patch late Thursday for a pair of "critical" security holes in its Internet Explorer Web browser but was still investigating a widely publicized vulnerability in its Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating systems. The browser patch corrects two flaws. The first makes it possible for a malicious hacker to place code on a Web surfer's PC by way of a cookie. Cookies are small files that Web sites place in a secure area on surfers' PCs to track return visits. The flaw allows a script embedded in a cookie to be saved outside the secure area, on the PC's hard disk. The code can then be triggered the next time the surfer visits the site.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-871826.html

Angry users: Yahoo's setting spam bait
Some Yahoo members on Friday reacted angrily to changes in the Web portal's e-mail marketing practices, comparing the company's revised policy to an open invitation to spam. "I never received any notification about this from Yahoo," one annoyed reader wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "I was merely lucky enough to have a friend warn me about it." The ire stems from changes in Yahoo's "marketing preferences" page, which the company uses to secure permission to send service promotions.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-871803.html

Is MPEG-4 a catalyst to meld Web, DVD?
Seven companies including Pioneer and Sharp agreed this week to build a system that would bring MPEG-4 to cable set-top boxes. Using the newly introduced compression format, which supporters say improves fourfold on the industry standard, the companies are developing an enhanced set-top box that combines the movie playback features of a DVD player and the interactivity of the Web.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-871766.html

Eric Raymond: Why open source will rule
Eric Raymond believes Linux is on a roll. Raymond is best known as the co-founder, with Bruce Perens, of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to promote Linux and other "free" software to businesses in a language they could understand. The OSI has largely succeeded in its aims, Raymond says, with backers like IBM heavily promoting Linux and big companies adopting the operating system for both back-end systems and desktops. Raymond is also the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and other open-source texts.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-871366.html

Turning PDAs into chatterboxes
The latest handheld devices are finding their voice. First there were PDAs that recognized written words on menus, street signs or business cards. Now there are PDAs being developed that can recognize verbal commands, translate them into another language, and then announce the translation in anything from a shout to a murmur. Handhelds from Hewlett-Packard and IBM with built-in talking capabilities are still in development. But one talking PDA, known as the Phraselator, is due to be shipped in the next few days to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-871807.html

DoubleClick nearing privacy settlements
A federal court on Friday granted DoubleClick preliminary approval to settle all state and federal class-action lawsuits that charged it violated the privacy of Web surfers. The preliminary settlement, set to be finalized May 21, would clear up class-action lawsuits from California, Texas and New York that were consolidated last year. The suits charged that DoubleClick violated state and federal laws by surreptitiously tracking and collecting consumers' personally identifiable data and combining it with information on their Web surfing habits.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-871654.html

Segway auctions close with 6-figure bids
Three lucky consumers will be among the first to own a Segway Human Transporter, but they will pay a pretty price. Auctions for three of the devices closed on Amazon.com on Thursday night at $100,600, $104,100 and, after several last-minute bids, $160,000. Bruce Waldack, an Internet millionaire and the founder of Thruport Technologies, won one of the HTs with the final bid of $100,600. Waldack, who collects vintage computers, sold DigitalNation, a Web hosting firm he founded, to Verio for $100 million in 1999.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-871142.html

U.S. prepares to invade your hard drive
If you think techies hate Microsoft, try asking them about Hollings -- Sen. Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings, that is, the South Carolina Democrat who finally introduced his long-dreaded copy protection bill into Congress last week. If there's an axis of evil for technology, Hollings has made the list. Hollings' bill, formerly referred to as the SSSCA (Security Systems Standards and Certification Act) but now dubbed the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), would require any device that can "retrieve or access copyrighted works in digital form" to include a federally mandated copy protection system.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/0...ill/index.html

FCC to vote on phone-number crunch
Cell phones, fax machines and pagers are dialing through the country's supply of phone numbers. The Federal Communications Commission, aware of the dwindling supply of 10-digit phone numbers and complaints from customers forced to change numbers, has already given telecom carriers a November deadline for allowing cell phone customers to keep their phone numbers if they switch service providers. But carriers have balked at the cost, which they put at $1 billion for the industry, and the FCC has already granted several deadline extensions to allow the carriers to make more pressing changes.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-870832.html?tag=cd_mh

Ruling bolsters file-traders' prospects
Embattled Internet song- and movie-swappers were given new hope Thursday by a Dutch court ruling protecting the legality of popular file-trading software. In a surprise decision, an appeals court in the Netherlands overturned a lower court ruling that had held file-trading company Kazaa BV liable for copyright infringement, saying Kazaa is not responsible for the illegal actions of people using its software. That decision -- which still can be appealed to a higher court -- was the first anywhere to protect a file-swapping company against copyright liability.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-870396.html?tag=cd_mh

Mozilla 1.0 nears release
The long-awaited open-source version of the Netscape Web browser has reached a major development milestone as it nears a first official release. The 3-year-old Mozilla project has finally stopped adding major new changes as its developers prepare a final 1.0 version of the software. Previous beta, or test, versions have been circulating for years. Because it is an open-source project, individual programmers who view the source code over time and suggest their own changes have done much of the development. That's made for a slow process and has led many even inside the open-source community to lose faith in Mozilla's relevance.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-871017.html?tag=cd_mh

Calif. man pleads guilty to video piracy
The Justice Department said Thursday that a California resident has pleaded guilty to copyright-infringement charges, involving more than 4,500 bootlegged videotapes. The Justice Department said 36-year-old Mohsin Mynaf of Vacaville, Calif., pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement, trafficking in counterfeit labels and circumventing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA is a controversial law backed by music companies and other large copyright holders that prohibits anyone from cracking code designed to protect copyrights.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-870888.html?tag=cd_mh

The Push for News Returns
Since the advent of the Web, humans have tried to find new ways to use technology to sift through the barrage of online news. After the promise of push slowly fizzled, startups like Farcast used customized agents to scan various news feeds and automatically send customized news to e-mail accounts. Now, in the latest attempt to automate the news, a group of Columbia researchers have launched Newsblaster, a project that uses natural language processing techniques to summarize top headlines.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,51112,00.html

Hollings Howls Will Have to Wait
Sen. Patrick Leahy says a controversial proposal to embed copy protection in electronics gear will not become law this year. Since Leahy is the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, his opposition instantly boosts the difficulty Hollywood studios will encounter in their attempts to enact sweeping copyright legislation.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51425,00.html

Genome Map on a Grain of Rice
One of the world's largest biotech companies will publish an extensive analysis of the rice genome, touted by researchers to have the potential to put a dent in world hunger. Researchers at Syngenta SYT, a Swiss biotech company, said it will make its rice genome data available for free to academic researchers, and available for a fee to corporate scientists.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,51428,00.html

Getting to the Root of All E-Mail
Squatting unobtrusively on the banks of a man-made pond in an unremarkable corporate subdivision a few miles outside the Beltway, the home of the Internet's authoritative root server and master registry of dot-com addresses is virtually indistinguishable from the other red-brick office buildings that surround it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Mar28.html

Sit. Speak. Good Photon
Light can be hard to handle, yet humans have nearly mastered it: We can create light (turn on a flashlight) and destroy it (shine it on black asphalt). We can measure it, bend it, and slow it down. We can use it to propel spacecraft, to transmit telephone conversations, to perform surgery. There seems to be no end to what light can do....
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2..._stoplight.htm

Quantum cloning nears perfection limit
A new experiment has brought "quantum cloning" to the edge of its theoretical limit of fidelity. The process of duplicating information held in subatomic systems constitutes the most effective way currently conceivable of decoding some of the latest cryptographic technologies. Particles such as photons and electrons have quantum properties that, according to the theory of relativity, can never be copied exactly unless you destroy the original in the process.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992111

How should we teach kids Newtonian physics? Simple. Play computer games
After Sputnik's launch, Bell Laboratories funded a series of documentaries designed to encourage popular-science literacy. Directed by Frank Capra and animated by Chuck Jones, the films coupled Hollywood showmanship with cutting edge research on such standard school topics as the solar system, meteorology and the human body. Initially aired on primetime network television, they circulated throughout the American education system for more than a decade — much to the delight of school children of my generation. Much of what I know about science I first learned from watching Our Mr. Sun and Hemo the Magnificent. These productions were part of a larger strategy — what one executive at the time called Operation Frontal Lobe — to demonstrate the educational value of the then-emerging medium of television.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/wo_jenkins032902.asp

More news later on

[RDixon]

Originally posted by walktalker
Segway auctions close with 6-figure bids
Three lucky consumers will be among the first to own a Segway Human Transporter, but they will pay a pretty price. Auctions for three of the devices closed on Amazon.com on Thursday night at $100,600, $104,100 and, after several last-minute bids, $160,000. Bruce Waldack, an Internet millionaire and the founder of Thruport Technologies, won one of the HTs with the final bid of $100,600. Waldack, who collects vintage computers, sold DigitalNation, a Web hosting firm he founded, to Verio for $100 million in 1999.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-871142.html

It never ceases to amaze me just how incredibly stupid some people are.