The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

Oh no, not another monday...

Sony pushes flash memory standard
Sony and its partners have increased their efforts to make the flash-memory card format known as Memory Stick a de facto standard, announcing Monday the upcoming introduction of a new, smaller version of the format, geared toward different types of devices. Memory Stick is a removable flash-memory card format roughly the size of a stick of chewing gum. Sony created it for portable consumer-electronics devices, such as cameras and digital audio players. The upcoming Memory Stick Duo is about one-third the size of the original, and is meant to fit into devices such as cell phones and small digital audio players, expanding the number of devices using Memory Stick technology.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-931155.html

Cable pirates splice into broadband
When Noah A., an AT&T Broadband customer, dropped his subscription to DirecTV several months back, he joined a small but growing group of cable TV pirates who use their high-speed Internet connection to pilfer video signals. Drawing on old-school methods to splice cable TV lines for unauthorized use, hackers say they can buy a splitter at the local electronics store and easily run an additional line from the cable modem line for the computer into the television. Without a set-top box, the result is free, basic, analog cable; with an illegal converter or set-top, hackers say they have access to premium channels such as HBO and Showtime.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-930410.html

Linux takes on Microsoft turf in Germany
The German government has signed a deal with IBM and Linux company SuSE that makes it easier for government offices to use the open-source operating system, a move that addresses concerns about relying too heavily on Microsoft products. The government isn't mandating the use of Linux, but the deal makes it possible for hundreds of federal, regional and local governments to purchase IBM computers running SuSE's version of Linux at a discount price, said German foreign ministry spokesman Dirk Inger. The purchasing framework covers both desktop computers, where Microsoft has its stronghold, and more powerful networked server systems where Linux is a stronger competitor.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-931115.html

Pop-under ad users may soon have to pay
Pop-under advertisements, the oft-annoying windows that spring up after a requested Web page, might pack a financial punch to the publishers supporting them if one dot-com has its way. ExitExchange, an ad-technology provider that is claiming rights to the invention dating back to 2000, had its patent application published by the U.S. Patent Office last week. The filing broadly covers any systematic delivery of a window launched after another, including those on devices such as cell phones. If its application is approved, ExitExchange will have rights to collect royalties on the use of pop-under ads.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-931146.html

Sonicblue: We're not watching you
Sonicblue has won a major victory in its fight to keep customers' television viewing habits a secret. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper on Friday overturned a late April ruling that required the maker of ReplayTV set-top box technology to write and install software to monitor what its customers were watching. "This is an important victory for us in the litigation, but most importantly, it's a victory for our consumers," Sonicblue CEO Ken Potashner said in a statement Monday.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-930694.html

Napster: Gimme shelter with bankruptcy
Napster, the struggling online music company, filed for bankruptcy protection Monday. The filing comes just weeks after Redwood City, Calif.-based Napster agreed to sell its assets to German media conglomerate Bertelsmann for $8 million. As expected at the time of that transaction, Napster said Monday that it has filed under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. Napster's service, which provided software that lets people swap music files over the Internet, has been shut down since July 2001 as a result of a lawsuit by the music industry. The company has been trying to strike licensing deals with record companies and music publishers to launch a revived, and legitimate, version of its service but to no avail.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-930462.html

Sonicblue cues up new ReplayTV device
Sonicblue's latest ReplayTV digital video recorders began shipping to retailers on Monday and should be available shortly, according to the company. DVRs are similar to VCRs, but instead of storing shows on a tape, they are stored on a hard drive. Sonicblue maintains a service that allows subscribers to pause live broadcasts, pick shows to record in the future, jump past commercials that are stored on the hard drive, and send shows to other ReplayTV units over the Internet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-931165.html?tag=fd_top

Sci-tech Web Award
It's no secret, of course, that the Internet is chock-full of information. Although much of it is solid and reliable -- and, yes, even entertaining -- much of it, sadly, is not. As we write this, the Web search engine Google, for instance, informs visitors that it sifts through 2,073,418,204 Web pages -- and those are just the ones it "knows" about. How, you may be wondering, is the average time-crunched science-and-technology aficionado to find the best sites with a minimum of fuss? We're glad you asked. In this, our second annual Scientific American.com Sci/Tech Web Awards, the editors have again done the work of sifting through the virtual piles of pages to find the top sites for your browsing pleasure.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ex...0302webawards/

Questions About Online Data
Can the easy distribution of data promised by the Internet actually bring the type of scrutiny that ultimately leads to less information being available? That is the question being raised by a new law called the Data Quality Act, which requires the government to set standards for the accuracy of scientific information used by federal agencies. It is the latest move from Washington highlighting the balance of risks and rewards when disseminating information on the Internet. The law, which takes full effect on Oct. 1, creates a system under which anyone could point out errors in documents; if an error is confirmed, an agency would have to remove the data from government Web sites and publications.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/te...gy/03NECO.html

Sex drives the gay male's Web experience
Since the dawn of the public's use of the Web, the gay community has had a unique, well-matched relationship to the technologies and services offered therein. Tapping into the electronic venue's easy anonymity, its global reach and affordability, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) users -- but perhaps most significantly, gay men -- have used online environments to forge community in climates that are often hostile to their identities. Same-sex unions and sexual activity, as it happens, are still illegal and are still the target of bigotry in many parts of the U.S. and the world.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/cultural/

Handwriting apps emerge from Intel China
Intel is trying to make computers see much better. The company's software and solutions group in Shanghai is working on software that lets PCs more readily understand shapes and visual patterns, which should ease the burden managing images, handwritten notes and other real world data. Ink Email, an application developed by the group, for example, can recognize and send written Chinese characters over e-mail. Currently, users can draw Chinese characters onto a screen, but a user has to go through additional steps before a PC or a handheld can understand what the user wrote.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-930234.html?tag=cd_mh

Japan fans wrestle Web for Cup tickets
The computer server for FIFA's ticketing page was unable to handle the demand from the fans -- many gave up after hours of trying. In a surprise move, FIFA from Sunday started offering tickets via the Internet for matches played in Japan, which Japanese organizers said had been sold out. "I am angry at FIFA. If the Japanese had handled ticketing, then everything would have (gone) smoothly," said Tadayuki Oikawa, who wrestled in vain with his computer for seven hours.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-931066.html?tag=cd_mh

Patent office looks to go electronic
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office wants to increase its use of computers, with the end goal that the entire process, from application to issuance, will take place electronically. The office will revamp fees to encourage e-filings and work with patent offices in Europe and Japan to develop software to process applications, said James Rogan, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, during a telephone press conference Monday. "Technology has become increasingly complex, and demands from customers for higher-quality products and services have escalated," Rogan said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-930804.html?tag=cd_mh

SBC, Yahoo launch co-branded Net access
SBC Communications on Monday launched co-branded dial-up Internet access services and announced plans to launch combined high-speed access services in the summer. The dial-up service, which is branded, SBC Yahoo Dial will run on SBC's network and include such Yahoo content as finance, music and calendaring, the companies said. As reported by News.com, the companies quietly launched the service last month. The partnership between Yahoo and SBC marks the first time the Web portal will receive a cut of Net access subscription fees.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-930464.html?tag=cd_mh

MIT student hacks into Xbox
A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims he has found a way to circumvent the security system for Microsoft's Xbox video game console, opening the way for hackers to use it to run competing software. The MIT computer expert, who posted his report on his university Web site over the weekend, also questioned the security behind Microsoft's soon-to-launch online service, Xbox Live, saying hackers could exploit a flaw in the system to identify individual players from their game machines.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-931296.html?tag=cd_mh

Seagate drive targets game consoles
Seagate Technology announced Monday a new hard-drive design aimed at consumer-electronics devices, including video game consoles and audio appliances. The U Series X drive includes a number of advances such as a quieter motor and a thinner profile that will improve cooling efficiency in devices using the drive. Target markets include home digital audio components, networked copiers, digital printers, routers and game consoles. The drive will come in a standard 20GB, 3.5-inch-wide configuration, although Seagate will produce a 10GB version for the Xbox.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-931047.html?tag=cd_mh

EPA: Old Computers No Longer Junk
Obsolete computers, televisions, VCRs and cell phones are flooding landfills and incinerators, causing hazardous substances such as lead and mercury to seep into the environment. Now, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to change its universal waste rule to encourage re-use and recycling, rather than dumping, of electronic equipment. But the EPA's plan doesn't go far enough, critics say.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52876,00.html

New Market Trend: Short, Distort
For every successful stock market scam, there is bound to be a buzzword to go along with it. In the bull market of the late 1990s, that buzzword was "pump and dump." Predicated on the relentless optimism of the times, the scam involved promoting the hell out of some worthless company, boosting its stock to unsustainable heights, and then selling quickly before it fell apart. So long as investors were willing to believe good things about obscure companies with businesses they didn't understand, the strategy worked.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,52785,00.html

Data Collection: More the Merrier
A team of physics researchers and computer scientists has carried out a successful simulation on a grid of computers at five universities and research sites, representing the next step in advancing distributed computing. The project is part of the development of the Compact Muon Solenoid Collaboration, one of many experiments that will be run on the Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator being built in Switzerland.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52909,00.html

Cancer-Cell Model Unveiled
A startup biotech company kicked off by a handful of Cornell PhDs will unveil on Monday the largest computer simulation of a cancer cell. The cancer-cell model is one step toward solving one of the biggest conundrums for scientists in the medical field: predicting human biology. Scientists have yet to model a complete cell, but Gene Network Sciences of Ithaca, New York, expects to have the basic functions of a cancer cell modeled by 2003.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52914,00.html

Starring on TV: The Milky Way
A beam of light takes 30,000 years to get from the Earth to the center of the Milky Way, but somehow you make the journey in two and a half minutes. A million stars stream past on your way into the core. And when you arrive, you fall into infinite blackness. Dozens of astrophysicists and computer scientists on Monday will present a computer-animated travelogue unlike any other. The Unfolding Universe -- an hour-long documentary to be shown on The Discovery Channel (9 p.m. EDT) -- tells the story of a spinning disc of a hundred-billion suns orbiting a globe of stars and stellar remnants with a gigantic black hole in the center.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52891,00.html

Study: Open source poses security risks
A conservative U.S. think tank suggests in an upcoming report that open-source software is inherently less secure than proprietary software, and warns governments against relying on it for national security. The white paper, Opening the Open Source Debate, from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (ADTI) will suggest that open source opens the gates to hackers and terrorists. "Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to 'open source' as some groups propose," ADTI said in a statement released ahead of the report.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-929669.html

Randomization - IBM's answer to Web privacy
IBM Corp's new Privacy Institute has decided that randomization may be the key to protecting consumer privacy on the web while also providing e-businesses with informative metrics on their customers. Thursday last week, the company said it has developed software that ensures consumers' sensitive data never leaves their computers in an accurate form, but can be reassembled at the back end in aggregate. IBM is looking for partners to develop the software.
http://www.theregus.com/content/23/25115.html

When hacking competitions go wrong
What do you do when you enter a hacking competition only to discover that the target server is running a cut-down operating system running with almost all services switched off so that it does not resemble a "real-world situation"? Simple. You hack the competition itself. This is exactly what appears to have happened in a hacking competition that promised a first prize of $100,000 and which now seems to be losing its lustre after hackers compromised the server that held registration details. The result is that what should have been a straightforward competition has turned into a convoluted tale of hackers attacking the wrong systems and organisers using a dubious server set-up in the first place. The episode raises a number of questions over how hacking competitions should be held in the future.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2111243,00.html

Universe is a computer
We are all living inside a gigantic computer. No, not The Matrix: the Universe. Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has estimated how much information the Universe can contain, and how many calculations it has performed since the Big Bang. Lloyd views every process, every change that takes place in the Universe, as a kind of computation. One way of looking at the exercise is to imagine setting up a simulation of the Universe, particle for particle, on a hypothetical super-duper computer.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020527/020527-16.html

The State of Biomedicine
Your dirt-biking expedition has ended painfully — a few ribs broken in a tumble on the trail — and the emergency-room doctor has sent you home with a bottle of codeine. It should be enough to tide you over until the bones heal, unless you’re one of the 20 million Americans who have a mutated form of an enzyme called cyp2d6, which normally converts codeine into the morphine that soothes pain. If you are, the enzyme won’t work, and the pills won’t even take the edge off. Worse yet, neither you nor your physician will know that until you take the drug. Such is the reality of medicine today.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/s...innov30602.asp

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
More news later on

Thanks for the first copy!

- tg