The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Cable: Will price tiers spark outcry?
After noticing that their online games of "EverQuest" were getting slower and slower, Jim Williamson and his 13-year-old daughter ran a speed check of his Time Warner Road Runner cable service. It was running at about half the speed they were used to, he says. Within a week, Time Warner e-mailed him an offer to "Increase your Road Runner speed!!!" by signing up for a more costly business-class service. "They never guaranteed us a set speed, so no one could complain about the loss," Williamson, of Pinellas County, Fla., wrote in an e-mail.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-885608.html

HP: Fired worker leaked company memos
Hewlett-Packard said in an e-mail to employees Wednesday that it has fired a worker who admitted to forwarding two company memos to the press. The company did not provide details on the worker, the contents of the memos or how it determined the employee's identity. In March, HP's shares slipped after a report that the head of HP's services unit sent staffers a memo discussing possible problems with the division.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-885602.html

Klez worm's on the loose again
A new variant of the Klez worm managed to squirm into computers in some parts of Asia on Tuesday and appeared to be spreading in the United States as of Wednesday. Alternately known as Klez.g, Klez.h and Klez.k, depending on the security advisory that's referring to it, the worm has its own e-mail engine to mass mail itself to potential victims, and it also attempts to deactivate some antivirus products. The worm can also spread to shared drives connected to PCs via local area networks or LANs.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-885087.html

Can search engines track down terrorists?
Some U.S. government officials engaged in the so-called war on terror would like to see privacy laws relaxed so they can get better access to e-mail and other sensitive material exchanged over the Internet. Other bureaucrats would be happy just to have a better filing system. Tracking down terrorists, after all, does not necessarily require intercepting top-secret conversations. Sometimes it is a more mundane task of making sure one government agency can share its records with another.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-885415.html

Microsoft looks to extend digital media reach
Microsoft, seeking to become a vital player in the budding world of digital media, detailed on Tuesday a host of software products intended to ensure its influence over music and video. Digital media such as MP3 music files or streams of video sent over the Internet must be created, edited, encrypted, encoded, indexed and distributed, and Microsoft has software involved in all these tasks, Amir Majidimehr, Microsoft's general manager of digital media, told hardware engineers at the company's WinHEC conference here.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-884588.html

Game sites agree to child-friendly rules
The Better Business Bureau has claimed a victory in its battle to make Web sites more child friendly. The Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the organization said Wednesday that Scan-command.com and Namcoarcade.com agreed to make changes to their sites to comply with its child-protection guidelines. CARU can solicit investigations by the Federal Trade Commission if a company continues to violate its principles or the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-885570.html

Music Services Aren't Napster, but the Industry Still Cries Foul
The record industry's legal victory over Napster last year has neither stopped the trading of free music online nor halted a slide in music sales. A new generation of free music exchanges has blossomed in place of Napster, which was forced offline by a California court in July and has yet to return. So the record companies have found themselves back in courtrooms worldwide and are facing a more complicated set of legal questions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/17/te...gy/17MUSI.html

HP to build Linux supercomputer
Hewlett-Packard announced a high-profile contract Tuesday to build a Linux-powered supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy. The $24.5 million supercomputer will be capable of processing 8.3 trillion calculations per second (8.3 teraflops), according to HP. That would place the system among the current top 10 of the world's fastest supercomputers, if it were operating today. HP expects to have the supercomputer running at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., early next year.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-884297.html?tag=cd_mh

Despite law, few people use e-signatures
Even in the Internet age, your John Hancock still matters. Most people are still putting pen to paper these days, despite a law signed by former President Clinton nearly two years ago that made electronic signatures the legal equivalent of traditional signatures. Electronic signatures were supposed to wipe out the need for time-consuming and costly efforts to sign certain documents. Bank loans, refinancing paperwork and legal documents were all targeted by backers of electronic signatures, with the idea of eliminating the need for meetings, notary publics or overnight deliveries to validate signatures.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-884544.html

Patent turns playtime into pay time
A 7-year-old Minnesota boy has patented a method for swinging side to side, meaning he could conceivably take playmates to court if they try his new trick without permission. U.S. Patent #6,368,227, issued April 9, describes a method for swinging "in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side-to-side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other." People have up until now only swung in a back-and-forth motion, or sometimes have twisted the chains so that the swing spins when unwound, the application says.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-885552.html?tag=cd_mh

Court orders ISP to pull sabotage info
German railway Deutsche Bahn has won a partial victory in its efforts to remove documents from the Internet that allegedly provide instructions for sabotaging trains. A Dutch court ordered Internet service provider XS4All to pull documents published by Radikal, a group opposed to the transportation of nuclear waste via rail. The group allegedly published instructions for sabotaging trains, known as Castor transports, by cutting overhead cable lines, among other tactics.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-885345.html?tag=cd_mh

International rulings cloud file swapping
Legal rulings on file-swapping are beginning to trickle out of courts across the globe, creating a patchwork of local laws that seek to control a technology with international reach. The Tokyo District Court last week ruled that Tokyo-based MMO Japan is prohibited from offering users its online file-swapping service, dubbed File Rogue. That decision, which marks the first court ruling in Japan on the issue, comes just weeks after a Dutch appeals court essentially rejected liability against file-swapping software maker Kazaa for distributing its code.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-885233.html?tag=cd_mh

Radio giant to offer music downloads
A new music-subscription service, carried on Clear Channel's sizable network of radio Web sites, is slated to launch Wednesday. Operated by start-up FullAudio, the long-promised service joins an increasingly crowded field of hopefuls trying to tempt Net music fans to trade in their post-Napster file-swapping services for legal music downloads. The small company is betting that distributing alongside the biggest radio corporation in the business will give it enough clout with consumers to compete with major-label-backed rivals Pressplay and MusicNet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-884504.html?tag=cd_mh

MORE NEWS LATER ON !

[walktalker]

Court: Child porn law violates free speech
The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a federal pornography law that makes it a crime to have computer-generated pictures that look like real children engaged in sexual acts, ruling the law violates free-speech rights. The high court's 6-3 ruling, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, represented a stinging setback for the Justice Department in an important test of the Constitution's First Amendment free-speech protections in the computer age.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-884085.html?tag=cd_mh

Science publisher eases copyright rule
A major publisher of scientific research is reversing a policy requiring its writers to comply with a hotly debated U.S. copyright law. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) said it will no longer require authors to attest that their work does not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The IEEE, publisher of nearly one-third of all computer science journals, said it is removing the requirement because it turned out to be more contentious than expected.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-883990.html?tag=cd_mh

Music sales dip; Net seen as culprit
Global music sales declined for the second consecutive year, a dip the recording industry blamed on the proliferation of free music swapping on the Internet. In 2001, worldwide music sales dropped 5 percent to $33.7 billion, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a record industry lobbying group. That figure is down again from the 5 percent drop in 2000 to $37 billion. For a more accurate comparison, the IFPI adjusted all 2000 sales figures to 2001 exchange rates in calculating the percent differences.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-883761.html?tag=cd_mh

Another Big MS Browser Hole Found
Internet Explorer users who click their browser's back button open the Windows operating system to a malicious hack attack. When users hit the back button on Explorer's toolbar, the browser's security settings for the "Internet" zone can be bypassed, and the browser will automatically execute malicious code embedded into a site's URL.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,51899,00.html

The Blogging Revolution
In the beginning - say 1994 - the phenomenon now called blogging was little more than the sometimes nutty, sometimes inspired writing of online diaries. These days, there are tech blogs and sex blogs and drug blogs and onanistic teenage blogs. But there are also news blogs and commentary blogs, sites packed with links and quips and ideas and arguments that only months ago were the near-monopoly of established news outlets. Poised between media, blogs can be as nuanced and well-sourced as traditional journalism, but they have the immediacy of talk radio. Amid it all, this much is clear: The phenomenon is real. Blogging is changing the media world and could, I think, foment a revolution in how journalism functions in our culture.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...read.html?pg=2

Pretty Big Rocks, All Lined Up
The five brightest planets visible from Earth have lined up in plain sight to form a spectacular celestial array that won't be seen again until 2040. Through the next four weeks, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn and Venus will appear tightly clustered in the western sky. They will be visible in the evening with the naked eye.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,51908,00.html

Slagging Over Sagging CD Sales
Digital piracy caused a drop in worldwide record sales, according to a report conducted by a trade association that represents the biggest record companies in the world. But an increasing chorus of industry watchers -- ranging from musicians to consumer rights organizations to a federal judge -- point to other culprits: the record labels themselves. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) announced that global music sales declined by 5 percent in 2001.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,51880,00.html

Perplexing Argentine Hack Law
A recent legal ruling that defacing Web pages is not a crime isn't turning Argentina into a prosecution-free playground for script kiddies. Argentinean sources said they are upset over several stories on Argentine federal judge Sergio Torres' ruling, which they believe erroneously indicated that Torres' decision gives the green light to all malicious hacking activities in Argentina. But the same sources also expressed concern that the ruling might embolden Argentine virus writers, who could see the ruling as an indication that releasing viruses on the Internet is not prosecutable under Argentina's laws.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51860,00.html

NASA: That Rain Came From Yonder
To the untrained eye, one raindrop looks like any other: small, watery, twice as many H's as O's -- all very predictable. Some eyes are better trained than others, however. Scientists at NASA have devised a computer model that can determine the originating point of the water contained in rain and snowstorms. This "water vapor tracer" should provide more accurate rainfall and drought forecasts and a greater understanding of how climates change.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,51673,00.html

New radiation detector is very cool
A portable new radiation detector could provide a much better way of monitoring pollution and detecting so-called "dirty" nuclear weapons, according to its inventors. The unit uses germanium crystals, which not only measure radiation, but can distinguish between different forms. The technique is also very sensitive but the crystals must be cooled to –186 °C. Most detectors of this type are therefore restricted to the laboratory, where they are chilled using liquid nitrogen.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992180

Consumer Group Joins Tiff Over PC Maker's Piracy Campaign
A consumer advocacy group has rebuked the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for its criticism of a PC maker's TV and Web campaigns to counter digital piracy legislation. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Digital Consumer late Tuesday condemned RIAA comments directed at Gateway. A Gateway TV commercial shows a truck-driving Tedd Waitt - the company's chief executive - and a bovine companion lip-synching to a hip-hop version of the Gordon Lightfoot tune "Sundown."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175936.html

Middle East conflict spills over into cyberspace
The political crisis in the Middle East has spawned an increase in defacement attacks on Israeli Web servers. Israel was the victim of 10 of 15 significant web defacements in the Middle East over the last two weeks, according to security consultancy mi2g. The most active anti-Israel hacker group, which claims to be Egyptian, started its activities just weeks after 11th September. Other Middle Eastern countries - Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan - have also been hit in April by politically motivated hack attacks, many international in origin.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24891.html

[floydian slip]

Originally posted by walktalker
Pretty Big Rocks, All Lined Up
The five brightest planets visible from Earth have lined up in plain sight to form a spectacular celestial array that won't be seen again until 2040. Through the next four weeks, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn and Venus will appear tightly clustered in the western sky. They will be visible in the evening with the naked eye.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,51908,00.html

FYI, Jupiter and Saturn are made of gas.

Ever heard 3rd rock from the Sun by Jimi Hendirx? Good tune, at the end he makes his guitar sound like a horse.

[JackSpratts]

it just keeps getting better and better wt. i read 'em all!

- js.

[RDixon]

Good stuff.