The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

News paradise for everyone, including all the nappyhardworkingnewsmanophobic ladies (assuming, of course, that there's any in this forum)

Wi-Fi, cell networks begin to meld
Wireless Internet service providers that use the 802.11b, or Wi-Fi, standard have started to let customers roam onto cellular networks. Palo Alto, Calif.-based WiFi Metro on Tuesday began letting people automatically switch to carriers that offer Internet capabilities, such as Verizon Wireless or Cingular Wireless, once they leave the range of the company's equipment. For customers to make the switch, they must be subscribers of both.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-924355.html

Linux development kernel gets Bluetooth
Support for Bluetooth has been added to the Linux development kernel, a step toward native Bluetooth support in upcoming releases of the Linux operating system. Bluetooth allows PCs, portable devices and peripherals the ability to connect to each other in a 'personal area network,' potentially replacing the clutter of wires that accompanies most computer systems. Research firm In-Stat/MDR projects that 100 million personal area networks will be installed this year, rising to more than 900 million in 2005.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-923165.html

Yahoo scrambles to fill Messenger hole
A security vulnerability that could allow hackers to delete files on someone's computer has prompted Yahoo to issue a fix for the latest version of its popular instant messaging software. The vulnerability allows hackers to impose a "buffer overflow" attack, meaning they could imbed a potentially harmful executable program on someone's computer. Using Yahoo Messenger as its conduit, hackers could delete files or cripple a computer's security. Yahoo updated the 5.0 version of its service Friday after the exploit was discovered.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-923683.html

Supreme Court rules for patent holders
In a minor win for patent holders, the U.S. Supreme Court has cut back a ruling that some inventors worried would lead to widespread copycatting of their products. The high court decided Tuesday to overturn parts of a lower court ruling that had limited a patent's scope. Many inventors, including those who work with tech products, feared the lower court ruling would allow copycats to rip off their products by making only minor changes.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-924359.html

New age pirates rap Eminem CD
Well before rapper Eminem's new record hit store shelves Sunday, it had already become the second-most-played CD in computer drives around the world, according to one closely watched measure. That figure comes care of Gracenote, a company whose window into computer users' listening habits offers a sobering look at the changing patterns of Internet piracy and traditional music bootlegging. Gracenote maintains a huge online database that can identify CDs by calling up the exact list and length of songs.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-923658.html

Modem owners get AT&T cable surprise
A new pricing structure from AT&T will result in modem owners paying an extra $7 for their high-speed Internet service. AT&T Broadband Internet will announce later Tuesday several changes to the way it charges for its cable modems. AT&T marketing executives framed the changes as price reductions based on the decreasing cost of hardware, but the end result will be higher costs for roughly 162,500 AT&T customers who own their own cable modems.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-923692.html

Klez surpasses SirCam in virus stakes
Klez.h appears to be overtaking SirCam as the most virulent computer virus to date. According to antivirus outsourcing firm MessageLabs, which scans e-mails for corporate clients, Klez.h overtook SirCam on Sunday and continues to spread, with the company's servers blocking up to 20,000 copies every working day. To date, MessageLabs has stopped over 800,000 copies of Klez.h. This particular version of the virus, which surfaced in April, is also known as Klez.g and Klez.k, depending on the security advisory that is referring to it.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-923199.html

Xbox hacking not for amateurs
The first Xbox add-ons that purportedly allow the console to play illegally copied game software have gone on sale, but analysts say they're unlikely to inspire a Napster-like wave of copy infringement. The Xtender, a "mod chip" intended to be added to the main circuit board of the Xbox, went on sale last weekend through retailers such as Hong Kong-based Lik Sang. Three other Xbox mod chips are also in development. Most of the mod chips promise similar functions based on disabling copy-protection features built into the Xbox.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-924666.html?tag=fd_top

Bug hunter reports flaw in Excel
A security hole in Microsoft's Excel XP spreadsheet application could allow hackers to take over a computer by using specially formed XML style sheets, according to a security expert. Georgi Guninski, a well-known security adviser, posted an advisory to his Web site on May 24 alerting people to the security hole. He said that the problem arises when a person opens an Excel spreadsheet file, choosing to view it with an XML style sheet. If the style sheet contains specially formed code, the PC will try to run that code, Guninski said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-924704.html?tag=fd_top

Chip cuts make for cheaper PCs
Personal computers, which any savvy shopper can pick up on the Internet for as little as $600, are about to become even cheaper, analysts said Tuesday. Intel this weekend slashed prices on microprocessors by as much as 53 percent, making it possible for PC makers to cut prices and potentially spur demand in the doggedly weak PC market.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-924700.html?tag=fd_top

Start-up looking to beat RIM to the punch
Lawyers said Tuesday that Good Technology's lawsuit against Research In Motion, maker of the market-leading BlackBerry handheld e-mail device, is a pre-emptive strike designed to give Good a kind of home-field advantage in an anticipated patent struggle. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Good filed the suit earlier this month in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The suit asks the court to establish that Good has not infringed on RIM's patent, or to invalidate that patent. Good's GoodLink software can replace RIM's software on the BlackBerry, and the company will officially release a BlackBerry-like gadget of its own later this year.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-923718.html?tag=fd_top

Why Dilbert loves the Internet
If you ask Scott Adams where he finds his inspiration, he'll tell you that he lives on "gripes." Few people know more about the desperate insanity -- or inanity -- of cubicle culture than Adams. As creator of the popular Dilbert comic strip, Adams has built a successful Dilbert empire -- both online and off -- lampooning the oddness that comes with working within a corporation's four walls. His strip about a zany office worker has appeared in 2,000 papers in 65 countries and 25 languages, as well as on the Web at his very own site, Dilbert.com, which receives over 1.4 million unique visitors per month.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-923069.html?tag=fd_nc_1

Our shiny happy clone future
Get those dystopic nightmares about genetically enhanced clone armies out of your sci-fi addled brain. Wipe the chilling phrase "designer baby" out of your short-term memory bank, and at least entertain the possibility that tinkering with our genes might make life longer, healthier, happier and better. Gregory Stock, the director of the UCLA Program on Medicine, Science and Technology, considers genetic engineering to be just as natural for humans as other technologies we've created: just another part of our evolution as a species.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/0...nes/index.html

From a Few Colored Lines Come the Sounds of Music
Sure, everyone is a critic. But Hyperscore also demonstrates how computer technology can help anybody — even someone who has never read a single note — compose complex music. The software is part of Toy Symphony, Mr. Machover's broader initiative for technology-assisted music education, and it can be downloaded free from the Internet site ToySymphony.net. Mr. Machover is a composer and professor of music and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. He was inspired to develop Hyperscore after discovering how few music-instruction options existed for his young daughters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/27/ar...ic/27ARTS.html

Paper-thin phone could replace letters
Soon you could be keeping your mobile phone in your purse or wallet alongside any banknotes you are carrying. Designer Stephen Forshaw has developed a wafer-thin phone stuck on to paper that can be used to make one call. Mr Forshaw speculated that the phone could become a novel alternative to greetings cards. The design has already won first prize in a competition sponsored by Sony.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/2006407.stm

Eight Technologies That Will Change the World
What happens when today's tech trends begin to intersect and feed off one another? They'll spawn new fields of knowledge that will transform everything.
http://www.business2.com/articles/ma...,40435,FF.html

Should the computer industry protect Hollywood from digital theft?
"This is WAR!" It certainly is. Hollywood has gone to Washington to stop the trading of pirated movies online. It has thrown its lobbying muscle behind a bill, introduced by South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings, that would order the Federal Communications Commission to find a way to halt this thievery if the entertainment and technology sectors can't come up with their own solution. Disney CEO Michael Eisner, testifying in favor of the bill, took the opportunity to bash Silicon Valley on the Senate floor: "We're dealing with an industry where an unspoken strategy is that the killer app is piracy."
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?...&doc_id=207975

Intel says "hola" to Barcelona labs
European design and engineering have long been used to market automobiles. Now Intel is hoping they can help boost its processors. The chipmaker on Tuesday announced it will establish a new processor research lab on the campus of the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. The facility, to be called Intel Labs Barcelona, will be staffed by engineers from both Intel and the university, which will be in charge of operating it.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-923206.html?tag=cd_mh

Alleged spammer on hot seat again
The New York Attorney General's office filed a lawsuit Monday against an alleged junk e-mailer, in the latest crackdown on unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer charged MonsterHut, a Niagara Falls, N.Y.-based direct marketer, with sending 500 million e-mails to people whom it falsely claimed had requested the material. "Every day New Yorkers are being inundated with unsolicited commercial e-mail," Spitzer said in a statement. "Some of the spam is a vehicle for fraud; some of the spam is inherently fraudulent...This lawsuit is the next battle in our continuing fight against online fraud and an attempt to help consumers maintain control of their e-mail in-boxes."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-923501.html?tag=cd_mh

Besieged ISP Restores Pearl Vid
The unedited video of journalist Daniel Pearl being murdered is back online. An Internet hosting company in Virginia, which the FBI threatened last week with federal obscenity charges, said on Monday afternoon that it would resume distribution of the horrific 4-minute video. Pro Hosters owner Ted Hickman said he and his customer, ogrish.com, decided to thumb their nose at the bureau's warnings for two reasons: A realization that the FBI's threats were spurious, and the legal aid of the American Civil Liberties Union.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52818,00.html

'678': The 666 of DSL Users
Anyone who sees those three numbers and is suddenly overcome by an irresistible desire to scream is probably a Windows XP user who has been trying unsuccessfully to set up a DSL connection. In Windows XP, "Error 678" is supposed to indicate that a remote computer did not respond to a connection attempt. In reality, it's simply a vague indication that something, somewhere, has somehow gone wrong.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52756,00.html

Thirsty? Hot? Take a Trip to Mars
A huge sea of ice lies just under the surface of Mars, ready to be tapped by future explorers as a source of fuel and maybe even drinking water, scientists report. It might also harbor life, and certainly explains where some of the water went when Mars went from being a warm and wet place to the cold, dry desert it is now, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Science.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52822,00.html

From Junkie to, Well, Junkman
James Burgett is a big, burly biker and an ex-heroin junkie who is building a trash empire from recycled computers. He has hooked together a cluster of junk machines into what may soon qualify as one of the world's fastest supercomputers. And he's a leading low-tech philanthropist, giving away thousands of refurbished computers to disadvantaged people all over the world, from human rights organizations in Guatemala to the hard-up Russian space program.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,52669,00.html

Of Doom, Gloom, Fun and Games
Video games and their designers are all grown up, ready to take on darker, mature themes. The change hasn't slowed their popularity with fans, but it has given lawmakers pause. The battle is one of generations. Most players are under 35, and the most hard-core of those have been playing games for most of their lives and plan to continue for the foreseeable future, according to a recent study by the Interactive Digital Software Association.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,52661,00.html

A Sudden Host of Questions on Bell Labs Breakthroughs
Dr. Schön and his collaborators have developed a revolutionary technique that allows them to explore systematically the electronic properties of various materials. Dr. Grant had called the team's "buckyball" work paper "a tour de force of physics" when it was announced. Other scientists said it might be worthy of a Nobel Prize. The superconductor work is not among the seven papers that include the suspect graphs, which report advances in organic transistors and molecular electronics. But the investigation casts a pall over all of Dr. Schön's research. He has been an author on more than 70 scientific papers in the last two and a half years — a remarkably prodigious output — and some people wonder whether there might be undiscovered problems with other papers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/28/science/28BELL.html

Webmasters Agree: Not All On Web Is Archive-worthy
Exactly which parts of an agency's Web site constitute federal records, subject to rules governing retention and disposition, depends on the agency in question. Officials of the National Archives and Records Administration and other agencies reached no consensus at last week's FedWeb 2002 conference at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The debate over maintenance of Web records was just one of the hot-button issues at the annual gathering. Other workshops tackled such topics as Web site design and performance, security requirements and the Government Paperwork Elimination Act.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002May28.html

DOD Documents Go From Being Classified To Webified
The Defense department has millions of pages of classified documents, going back decades, stored in manila folders inside boxes at the National Record Center in Suitland, Md., and Archives II at College Park, Md. The paper and microfilm documents include policy decisions, intelligence reports, treaty negotiations, chemical and biological studies, and weapons development reports once classified as top-secret. Defense and contractor reviewers are painstakingly examining the documents - line by line, page by page - to see if they can be declassified. After the manual review, officials use high-speed, flatbed scanners to capture the declassified documents and transfer them to TIFF images.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176777.html

Anti-snooping operating system close to launch
Computer activists in Britain are close to completing an operating system that could undermine government efforts to the wiretap the internet. The UK Home Office has condemned the project as potentially providing a new tool for criminals. Electronic communications can be kept private using encryption. But new UK legislation will soon give law enforcers the right to demand encryption keys from anyone suspected of illegal activity. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) was introduced to update UK surveillance laws to include electronic communications. But privacy campaigners say it gives too much power to law enforcers and permits intrusive eavesdropping.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992335

Rebuilding the genius machines
In August 1901, the Wright brothers were ready to give up. They had spent a frustrating summer testing their latest glider on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and nothing seemed to go as planned. And yet only two years later, on December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers flew. The toss of a coin made Orville the pilot; Wilbur remained on the ground. A Kitty Hawk local used Orville's big box camera to record the world's first powered flight at 10:35 a.m. on a cold, windy morning. Almost a century has passed since that day on the beach, and experts are still trying to understand how two men who never finished high school managed to fulfill an age-old human dream. In just four years the Wrights advanced from building kites to constructing a motorized, 605-pound airplane made largely of spruce, ash, and muslin that carried Orville 120 feet in 12 seconds.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviatio...241135,00.html

More news later on

[VWguy]

News paradise for everyone, including all the nappyhardworkingnewsmanophobic ladies (assuming, of course, that there's any in this forum)

Could it be....Tankgirl?

Nah.

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
News paradise for everyone, including all the nappyhardworkingnewsmanophobic ladies (assuming, of course, that there's any in this forum)

As reported by our hard-working, unselfish, non-whining newsman:
Anti-snooping operating system close to launch
Computer activists in Britain are close to completing an operating system that could undermine government efforts to the wiretap the internet. The UK Home Office has condemned the project as potentially providing a new tool for criminals. Electronic communications can be kept private using encryption. But new UK legislation will soon give law enforcers the right to demand encryption keys from anyone suspected of illegal activity. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) was introduced to update UK surveillance laws to include electronic communications. But privacy campaigners say it gives too much power to law enforcers and permits intrusive eavesdropping.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992335

This is an interesting battle. It is still hard to believe that Brits have allowed such a privacy-ripping legislation to pass, making UK effectively an online police state:

RIPA, introduced in July 2000, allows UK police to intercept electronic communications using equipment installed at ISPs. When part three of RIPA is brought into power later in 2002, police will also be able to demand access to message encryption keys. Those who fail to hand over their keys could face a prison sentence.

- tg

[twinspan]

Originally posted by TankGirl

This is an interesting battle. It is still hard to believe that Brits have allowed such a privacy-ripping legislation to pass, making UK effectively an online police state:

Particularly incredible when you consider that in the UK just mentioning the idea of photos on driving licenses inspires even crusty Tories to revolutionary rhetoric about the inviolable freedoms of the individual.

I suppose this kind of sh1t gets passed in a first-past-the-post system that has resulted in the govt having a majority of Stalinesque proportions. And of course the bureaucrats (who know that they know what's best for everyone) act all indignant & surprised that that people don't take their shit lying down.

Viva m-o-o-t! Viva la revolucion!

[mozart]

Originally posted by TankGirl

This is an interesting battle. It is still hard to believe that Brits have allowed such a privacy-ripping legislation to pass, making UK effectively an online police state:

You can pass pretty much any law you like simply by pretending its an anti-terrorist measure.

Seriously though, this is a reflection of the degree of power our government holds. We barely avoided passing a law a few months back that allowed the home secretary to have anyone he felt like arrested without having to account for it.