The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Hum... That's a newspaper folks

Microsoft warns of debugger flaw
Microsoft warned Windows NT and 2000 users on Wednesday of a new flaw in its debugger tools that could let attackers give themselves complete control of a system once they've gained basic access to that system. The vulnerability involves a flaw in the debugger's authorization feature. The flaw lets any user run any program on the system, with the highest privileges. The hole could be used in conjunction with other Windows vulnerabilities that allow a remote attacker to run as a local user, said Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer with network-protection company eEye Digital Security.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-921107.html

Sony ships PS2-Linux PC conversion kit
Sony Computer Entertainment has begun shipping a kit for turning the PlayStation 2 into a Linux console, bowing to the requests of thousands of open-source programmers. The kit is available in the United States and Europe. It includes hardware and software for essentially turning the PlayStation 2 games console into a Linux PC, with a 40GB hard disk, 10/100Mbps network adapter, USB keyboard and mouse, monitor cable and a Linux installation DVD-ROM. The hard drive can't be used with PS2 games, Sony warned. The keyboard is in the standard U.S. layout, but can be reconfigured for other layouts, or replaced with any USB keyboard, Sony said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-921233.html

You can't hide behind your home page
The Federal Trade Commission is backing a plan that would require Internet registrars to deny domain names to people who submit incomplete or false applications. "Inaccurate 'WHOIS' data help Internet scam artists remain anonymous and stymie law-enforcement efforts," J. Howard Beales, director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection, told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property on Wednesday.The WHOIS database contains basic information about owners of .com, .net and .org domains, including names, addresses and phone numbers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-921367.html

Yahoo yields to eBay in Europe
Yahoo will close five of its auction sites in Europe and instead promote eBay's competing auctions as part of an agreement the companies announced Wednesday. Within the next several weeks, Yahoo will stop accepting new listings for its auction sites that serve France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Additionally, it will close its auction site that serves the United Kingdom and Ireland. The company will promote eBay's sites for each of those countries via banner ads and text links.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-921239.html

Paper phone wins Sony contest
With markets for mobile phones close to saturation, manufacturers will be vying to tap into wafer-thin technology, says the designer of a new "letter-mobile" phone. Stephen Forshaw's invention won first prize in a competition sponsored by Sony, which alongside number-one handset maker Nokia, has been hit by shrinking demand for new mobiles. "The mobile phone market is saturated, but technology is getting smaller and there is potential for these sorts of devices," Forshaw said on Thursday. His invention, called PS Call Me, is a folded piece of paper with a circuit, posted as a letter. The recipient can call the sender back by pressing a button.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-921168.html

"Myst" adds twist to online gaming
The creators of "Myst," one of the most popular PC games of all time, are working on an online version of the adventure game, publisher Ubi Soft Entertainment announced Thursday. "Myst Online" will go on sale next year at a date to be announced, the company said at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show here. The game will include both a boxed software product and a subscription online service, the company said. The announcement marks the latest attempt to expand the popularity of the potentially lucrative online gaming world, currently dominated by fantasy games such as Sony's "EverQuest," which has hundreds of thousands of players paying monthly fees to access its virtual world.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-921390.html?tag=fd_top

Bringing rapid-fire photos to digicams
Sure, your spiffy new digital camera has a big zoom lens and can capture millions of pixels. But what kind of signal processor is it packing? NuCore Technologies, a semiconductor start-up with offices in Japan and Silicon Valley, is hoping to get consumers and camera makers to pay attention to some of the overlooked elements that make a digital camera work. When it comes to semiconductors, most of the attention in digital cameras goes to image sensors, the chips that capture light from a camera lens.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-921570.html?tag=fd_top

Give it away now
"You want to stop piracy?" asks Jack Scalfani, CEO of independent music site FightCloud.com. "Make your CDs affordable. I'm not going to spend three hours turning and burning a CD ... if it's an $8 CD. I'm going to walk across the street to Tower Records and go, 'Here's my $8, thanks for the new Madonna.' My time is worth more to me than the money, so I will put the money out if it's a good price." At FightCloud.com, the price is right. Scalfani sells CDs for free. That is, if you don't count the $4.95 "shipping" charge. Of course, that would be a mistake.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/0...oud/index.html

IRS adjusting site pages to curb fraud
The Internal Revenue Service is tweaking the technology in its Web pages so that people surfing the Web to research ways of avoiding taxes will turn up the agency's fraud pages instead. The IRS publishes information on the Internet about suspect tax schemes and online scams. The agency is trying to make those pages more prominent in search results by using key words or metatags, code that is not visible to Web surfers, but helps search engines find relevant sites. Sample metatags the IRS is looking at include the terms "pay no tax" and "form 1040."
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-921263.html?tag=fd_top

Top 10 e-mail scams exposed
Fraudsters are moving with the times, with many now using e-mail to cheat innocent web surfers of their hard-earned cash, according to a new study. Ninety-four percent of respondents to a National Consumers League survey said they had received unsolicited emails offering financial services or touting dubious money-making schemes. The NCL, the main US consumer lobby, warned that many of these offers could be fraudulent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/bus...00/2003264.stm

Paint retailer brushes up on Linux
Sherwin-Williams Paint Stores has signed a multimillion-dollar deal to use 9,700 IBM Linux PCs to run operations in its paint retail stores, the companies will announce Thursday. Sherwin-Williams will use the PCs in more than 2,500 stores for running each store's centralized cash register software, reading e-mail and browsing the company's intranet, and for securely recording customers' choices in custom paint tints. The Linux systems will replace a version of Unix from the Santa Cruz Operation, a company that Linux seller Caldera International acquired in 2001. The SCO products have been popular in "replicated sites," the nearly identical retail outlets for companies such as Pizza Hut or Blockbuster Video that dot mini-malls, downtowns and shopping centers.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-921024.html?tag=cd_mh

Sony's $28.5 million ounce of prevention
Sony said Thursday that it would pay InterTrust Technologies $28.5 million to license the company's technology for preventing unauthorized copying of digitized music. "Digital-rights management and copyright protection technology are an important area for Sony," a Sony representative said. Sony, which operates a major recording company and is the world's largest manufacturer of audio-video electronics, has been eager to promote copyright protection as the advance of digital and Internet technologies makes unauthorized copying easier.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-921165.html?tag=cd_mh

A Bot That Knows Where It's Going
Looking for the latest video games at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a handful of people here have instead come across a two-foot-tall robot retrieving Heineken beer, reading children's books and listening to N' Sync. Evolution Robotics' new mobile robot isn't much to look at -- little more than a Pentium laptop strapped on a wheeled aluminum chassis, with a foot-long arm with a handgrip, and carrying a USB digital camera. But ER1 just could be the first of a new generation of semi-autonomous robots.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52757,00.html

Early Universe Images Emerge
New images of the early universe -- a time before galaxies, stars or planets -- show the cosmic hot spots that eventually evolved into all matter and energy, scientists reported on Thursday. The pictures, made by a scientific instrument called the Cosmic Background Imager on a desolate Andean plateau in Chile, are the most detailed images of the oldest light ever emitted, researcher said at a news conference.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52763,00.html

Act Would OK Snail Mail Searches
Just a few years ago, the U.S. Postal Service got savaged by privacy advocates after suggesting that private mailbox services were somehow objectionable. Since services like Mailboxes Etc. could encourage fraud, the post office declared, businesses must limit anonymity by demanding photo ID from all customers. Three years later, the Postal Service's lobbyists are fighting for Americans' privacy rights -- and opposing a bill in Congress that would allow U.S. Customs agents to open any internationally-mailed letter or parcel for almost any reason.
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,52739,00.html

Fake Bodies That Look, Feel, And (uhh) Smell Real
Surgery has gotten under David Fineberg's skin. The professor of medicine will never forget his first glimpse of the operating room. "As soon as I saw it and felt it, I was hooked," he says. Now Fineberg has made it his life's work to bring that experience - or, rather, an amazingly lifelike approximation of it - to the masses, starting with medical students. Fineberg, 39, is the lead visionary of the Living Anatomy Program, a sweeping initiative at the University at Buffalo. His goal: to create a synthetic human body that looks, feels, and even smells like the real deal. Combining manufactured parts with virtual reality simulations, the so-called augmented reality project aims to enable students to learn anatomy and to practice surgical procedures using a lifelike model - without harming patients.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...tart.html?pg=7

Seething Over the Search for Cash
Long gone are the days of "pure" search engines, services whose main goal is to help people rather than to make money -- everyone knows that. The biggest search engines now are businesses, many of them struggling businesses, and the world of search has become cutthroat, dog-eat-dog, fight-to-the-death, ugly. But there are apparently still some practices that are frowned upon in the all's-fair world of search, and LookSmart -- the directory company that provides listings for some of the Internet's biggest search engines, including MSN Search -- is being accused by webmasters and search engine experts of biting the hand that fed them.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,52741,00.html

Anybody Really Know What Time Is?
According to fundamental laws of physics, time is just another coordinate -- hash marks along a line with scarcely a preferred direction or flow. Yet the mind perceives time as an irreversible stream, moving from past to future, experienced in the present. Manipulating time may make for good science fiction, but it's hardly conceivable to those unfortunates who don't have a Tardis or H.G. Wells' secret recipe. How can science bridge the gaping gulf between these two versions of time?
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52703,00.html

Open-Source Fight Flares At Pentagon
Microsoft Corp. is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant, according to officials familiar with the campaign. In what one military source called a "barrage" of contacts with officials at the Defense Information Systems Agency and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the past few months, the company said "open source" software threatens security and its intellectual property. But the effort may have backfired.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002May22.html

Earthquake Predication Scores One
The magnitude 5.2 earthquake that occurred near Gilroy, Calif., on Monday was the fourth to have been correctly plotted on a forecast anomaly map developed by researchers at the University of Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.In a paper published in the Feb. 19th Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, CIRES scientists John Rundle and Kristy Tiampo, used a new method to forecast the occurrence of earthquakes greater than magnitude 5 in central and southern California that are likely to occur in the interval from Jan. 1, 2000 through Dec. 31, 2010. Two such earthquakes have occurred within the margin of error near forecast locations since the paper was published.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/tectonics-02e.html

Hoping DNA Will Discover Columbus, Post-Mortem
In death as in life, it seems, Christopher Columbus could never stay in one place. The many journeys made post-mortem by Columbus, or Cristóbal Colón as he is known in Spain, has led to doubt and confusion over his last resting place, with rival tombs claimed by authorities in Seville and Santo Domingo. Two Spanish teachers, one a history professor with an interest in genealogy, have now enlisted a prominent forensic science team to try to resolve the dispute with the help of DNA identification. "We have two Colóns, or possibly even a third, buried in the church of La Cartuja in Seville," explained the professor, Marcial Castro, who teaches at a public school in Andalusia and is the driving force behind the project.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/23/in...pe/23SPAI.html

Quantum wormholes could carry people
All around us are tiny doors that lead to the rest of the Universe. Predicted by Einstein's equations, these quantum wormholes offer a faster-than-light short cut to the rest of the cosmos - at least in principle. Now physicists believe they could open these doors wide enough to allow someone to travel through. Quantum wormholes are thought to be much smaller than even protons and electrons, and until now no one has modelled what happens when something passes through one. So Sean Hayward at Ewha Womans University in Korea and Hisa-aki Shinkai at the Riken Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan decided to do the sums. They have found that any matter travelling through adds positive energy to the wormhole. That unexpectedly collapses it into a black hole, a supermassive region with a gravitational pull so strong not even light can escape.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992312

NASA Ignores ISS Remote Sensing & Photo Capabilities
The International Space Station (ISS) sports an extraordinary optical quality window - the best ever flown on a piloted spacecraft. Missing at NASA, however, is clarity of vision regarding full use of this unique porthole on the world. The optical-quality window in the U.S. Destiny Laboratory became part of the orbiting outpost in February 2001. Since that time, ISS crews have become snap happy, picking their shots of Earth using digital still cameras, 35-mm and 70-mm cameras, and making use of a range of lenses. The eye-catching result? The first three resident space station crews clicked nearly 13,500 pictures of our planet. In the process, a new standard has been set for Earth photography.
http://www.space.com/news/iss_worf_020523.html

Two Kazakhstanis Charged In Bloomberg Extortion Plot
Two Kazakhstan citizens are in New York to face charges for plotting to extort $200,000 from Bloomberg L.P. in exchange for telling how they broke into a company' database, the FBI said. The duo, first arrested in August 2000 in England, were extradited to the United States and made their first court appearance this week, said agent Kevin Donovan of the FBI's New York field office.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176742.html

EFF Responds In California DVD Cracking Case
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Project today asked the California Supreme Court to uphold a lower court's decision to permit publication of the source code for DeCSS technology, which circumvents digital copy protection systems. DeCSS is a computer program designed to defeat an encryption-based copy protection system known as the Content Scramble System, or CSS, which is employed to encrypt and protect the copyrighted motion pictures contained on DVDs. Today's brief is in response to a March 26 filing by the DVD Copy Control Association.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176727.html

More news later on

[campingman]

Great job newsman i look forward to your paper
every day