That's the Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

Richard Strauss' Sunrise playing in the background lol

U.S. to MS: We won't help you kill case
The U.S. government on Monday declined to back Microsoft's effort to throw out claims that nine states have made against it on grounds that a proposed antitrust settlement has already been reached with the federal government. Microsoft in February had asked the judge in the landmark antitrust case to dismiss the states' proposed antitrust sanctions, arguing that they lack standing without the federal government's support.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-883362.html

HP upgrades DVD+RW drives -- at a price
Hewlett-Packard will offer frustrated customers who own its first DVD-rewritable drive a chance to trade it in for a model that will support record-once DVD discs -- but it will cost $99. The company will swap the first-generation DVD100i drives with ones that will handle both DVD+RW (DVD-rewritable) discs and the less-expensive DVD+R (DVD-recordable) discs. Last month the PC maker backed off of its initial claims that it would offer an upgrade for its earlier drive, the DVD100i, saying it would not be possible.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-883124.html

Intel price cuts usher in new P4
Intel cut prices on Pentium 4 and Pentium III chips for desktops and on several low-voltage mobile chips on Sunday by up to 32 percent to make way for new processors that will appear over the next few weeks, the company said. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker slashed prices on the 2.2GHz Pentium 4 by 25 percent, dropping it from $562 to $423, while it cut the price of the 2GHz Pentium 4 by 22 percent, sliding it from $364 to $284. The 1.2GHz Pentium III for desktops went from $241 to $163, a 32 percent decline.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-882917.html

Labels to count cost of pirates' plunder
Record executives Tuesday will gather at a plush London hotel to release annual global music sales figures, but this year music pirates are expected to steal the spotlight from the chart-toppers. The event, hosted by International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), had been the measuring stick to determine who's hot and who's not in the fickle recording industry. Lately though, the gathering has taken on a more somber tone as executives decry the amount of business they're losing to rampant CD-copying, or "burning," and Internet file-swapping services such as Kazaa and Morpheus.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-882873.html

Microsoft Freestyle PCs: New digital hub?
This holiday season, a new breed of Windows PCs will land on store shelves. The question is whether people will go for them. Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and some other PC manufacturers will be selling upscale Windows XP computers with Freestyle, an additional software module from Microsoft that lets consumers use their PCs to record TV programs like a TiVo set-top box. Freestyle PCs will also come with a remote control.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-882431.html

Home phones losing out to cell phones?
Cordless-phone makers are pulling out all the stops to hold on to their customers. An increasing number of people with both a cell phone and a home phone are choosing to junk their landline. In response, the makers of cordless phones are going on the offensive, making their phones look and feel more like cell phones -- or even act like them. "Many people in this industry are very, very worried," said Howard Gutowitz, founder of Eatoni Ergonomics, which makes software used to enter text into cordless phones.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-882429.html

Classroom bullies harnessing Net power
Playground bullies are harnessing the power of technology to persecute their victims around the clock, a U.K.-based children's charity warned Monday. NCH, one of the United Kingdom's leading children's charities, said the latest generation of schoolchildren is without refuge from a phenomenon that all too often drives vulnerable children to suicide -- with one in every four suffering bullying by text-message or e-mail, or in Internet chat rooms.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-882613.html

Listen.com warms to CD burning
Listen.com said Monday that it plans to let some songs on its digital music service be copied onto CDs, a step toward allowing its subscribers to play music when they want, where they want. The music service provider said that each month, subscribers to its Rhapsody service will be able to burn onto CDs a limited number of tracks from classical music label Naxos of America. Listen.com plans to offer the feature, which will use NewTech Infosystems' CD-Writing Engine, in its Rhapsody 1.5, expected in next month.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-883154.html

FTC expands anti-fraud sweeps
Federal regulators said Monday that they have filed charges against 11 companies that they accused of running -- online and off -- a variety of scams, from loans that did not come through to work-at-home schemes that promised easy riches. The companies named in a series of complaints sold a range of services to consumers, the Federal Trade Commission said. Some promised loans or credit cards that never materialized, while others offered to help consumers set up their own medical-billing or envelope-stuffing businesses that had long odds of success.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-883316.html

In defense of copyright
Morton David Goldberg's name is hardly a household word for technology geeks worried about the corporate drive to take ownership of intellectual property to unprecedented heights. But Goldberg, a partner at Cowan Liebowitz and Latman in New York, has spent nearly 50 years working as a copyright attorney. He's also lectured at Stanford, served as president of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. and advised the World Intellectual Property Organization. His profile is also set to rise. Goldberg has become the unofficial point man for a movement within the American Bar Association to defend the controversial Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/0...nse/index.html

Hack a server? Win $100,000
A Korean company is offering $100,000 in a 48-hour hacking competition, to be run this week. Korea Digital Works (KDWorks) will launch the competition, which will involve gaining root access to a server, on April 16 at 11 a.m. Korean Standard Time. The competition is aimed at demonstrating the resilience of KDWorks' World OK Security (WOKS) solution, according to Justin Kim, an attorney with U.S.-based Mike Choi International Consulting, who is helping to promote the event.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-882663.html

Linux geeks play Hollywood politics
Spooked by Hollywood-backed legislation that seeks to regulate technology, Linux geeks plan to launch a political-action committee that fights back. Jeff Gerhardt, host of "The Linux Show," and Doc Searls, senior editor of the Linux Journal, are forming a lobbying group called GeekPAC that would try to convince lawmakers to consider developers when they draft laws concerning technology. The goal is to ensure that legislative attempts to protect the interests of companies such as Walt Disney and the Baby Bells don't stifle technological development.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-881936.html

Waiter, there's a fly in my cell phone
British Telecommunications is learning that not all bugs are bad when it comes to computing and network technology. The telecommunications company has found that the way a fruit fly grows its exoskeleton has useful lessons for a company trying to figure out how to get the most use out of a network of cell phone antennas. The general approach is to let parts of the network negotiate their configurations among themselves rather than to dictate the settings from a central location, said Mark Shackleton, project manager for pervasive computing at British Telecommunications' BTexact research labs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-882200.html?tag=cd_mh

Mozilla poised for revival
Mozilla is an unlikely candidate for a comeback, given that it is barely sliding out of the box. But a comeback is exactly what the open-source project hopes to pull off in the next few weeks, when the Netscape Communications-backed effort releases the first official version of its Web browser. After four years in development, the pending event has renewed excitement in a project that once was hailed as a possible Microsoft killer -- only to tumble into obscurity after lengthy delays.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-881529.html

Google tests search tools for developers
Google is quietly testing a new service that lets Web developers perform automated searches of its vast Internet database and publish the results on their own sites. The service, launched Thursday, is called Google Web APIs, for application programming interfaces. The tools let noncommercial software developers "query more than 2 billion Web documents directly from their own computer programs," according to Google's Web site. For now, the service is free. After registering with Google and downloading an instruction kit, developers are allowed to conduct up to 1,000 automated queries a day -- a practice that is forbidden on the site otherwise.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-882252.html?tag=cd_mh

Anti-copying firm eases CD controls
SunnComm is adding a spoonful of sugar to its anti-copying medicine. The Phoenix, Ariz.-based copy-protection company has been the target of consumer outrage over its technology, which is designed to stop people from shifting music tracks from CDs to their computers. On Thursday, it offered a compromise, adding a feature that lets people e-mail songs from protected albums to family and friends. SunnComm said a file expires after the recipient listens to the song a certain number of times.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-882221.html?tag=cd_mh

Digital ads entangle "Spider-Man"The owners of coveted billboard space in Times Square are trying to tangle the makers of the "Spider-Man" movie in their own web of woes. Alleging a litany of violations ranging from trespassing and piracy to deceptive trade practices, Sherwood 48 Associates and Super Sign have sued Sony and other companies involved in making and distributing the upcoming "Spider-Man" movie for digitally superimposing advertisements for other companies over their billboard space in the film.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-882158.html?tag=cd_mh

Spam throws on a disguise
Spam's newest pitches are coming to you courtesy of friends and co-workers -- or so it might seem. In one of the latest marketing gimmicks circulating the Net, the sender comes disguised as a corporate network administrator with the subject line: "Your mailbox is over its size limit." Once opened, however, the e-mail's message lewdly invites the recipient to view adult material. Such spam tricks are designed to make spam harder to ignore -- an increasingly difficult task with skeptical consumers battling e-mail overload. As a result, commercial messages with familiar-looking origins and subject lines are becoming the norm.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-881979.html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

MS Trial: A Call for a New Office
An economist testifying against Microsoft on Monday supported a proposal to create a version of Microsoft Office that runs on alternative operating systems such as Linux. University of California at Berkeley professor Carl Shapiro told a judge that he favored a provision to auction licenses to create versions of Microsoft Office for operating systems other than Windows and the Mac OS.
http://www.wired.com/news/antitrust/...,51841,00.html

Genome Group Rips Human Cloning
Scientists at the Human Genome Organization have condemned plans for human cloning, saying it raises deep concerns over moral issues and arguing that the technology was far from mature and its side effects were unknown. Human embryo cloning as proposed by Britain's Roslin Institute, the creators of Dolly the cloned sheep, is a dangerous step leading to reproductive cloning which should be banned, scientists said Monday.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51808,00.html

A New Plan To Provide Broadband
When Pete Aquino and Peter Stevenson returned to Northern Virginia after running a telecom company in Venezuela for five years, they expected access to all the luxuries that modern technology can offer. They were disappointed with what they found. "We couldn't get DSL; our cable service was terrible. It was all very frustrating," Aquino said. "So we started investigating why broadband hadn't developed in the U.S."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Apr14.html

Step-by-step bomb guide 'made public'
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) says it is "checking" claims that one of its documents - detailing a step-by-step guide on how to build an atomic bomb - has been put in a public office for all to see. The file is said to be in the archives at the Public Record Office, which can be accessed by anyone, including terrorists, and gives measurements, diagrams and precise details on bomb-building, the Daily Telegraph reported.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/...00/1931103.stm

Identity Theft Insurance Going Mainstream
Consumer concern over online fraud is helping a Fairfax, Va., company turn its identity-theft protection service into a product that's catching the attention of mainstream insurance companies. One such company, Farmers Home Group of Minneapolis, Minn., announced today that it would resell the Identity Theft Protection Plan launched more than a year ago by privately held PromiseMark Inc.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175890.html

Google Provides Scientology Warnings To Free Speech Site
Less than a month after de-listing an anti-Scientology Web site from its search engine on copyright infringement grounds, Google has begun providing copies of the infringement notices that it receives to a recently formed free-speech advocacy site, a Google spokesman confirmed today. Earlier this week, Google sent a copy of an infringement warning it received from the Church of Scientology to the operators of Chillingeffects.org, a site that aims to educate Internet posters about their First Amendment rights in the face of legal warnings.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175863.html

Ashcroft Calls For Web-Based Terrorist Data System
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft on Thursday called on various law enforcement agencies within the Justice Department to construct a Web-based system for sharing terrorist data with state officials. Ashcroft directed the deputy attorney general to coordinate the building of a secure but unclassified Web-based system that would enable local, state and federal users to post, retrieve and read documents and photos, as well as send and receive secure e-mail.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175861.html

Royalty, Auditing Plans Could Crush Campus Webcasters
Cash-strapped college radio stations could be among the biggest losers if Webcasters must pay proposed music royalties and maintain complex, expensive playlist audits, according to public comments filed with the U.S. Copyright Office. "If the Copyright Office codifies these reporting requirements without reconciling the effects on these stations and their audiences, it will have a chilling effect on creativity, learning, education, research and society," wrote Cary S. Tepper, lawyer for Collegiate Broadcasters Inc., in a letter filed with the Copyright Office on April 4.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175860.html

ReplayTV 4000: A TV Recorder That Relays
Ever wanted to send a TV show or movie to a friend the way you might e-mail a digital photo? SonicBlue thinks you might, and has launched an ambitious line of personal video recorders (PVRs) that do that -- more or less. Its ReplayTV 4000-series unit, which digitally stores TV programs on an internal hard drive, can send a crisp, clear copy of a show to another ReplayTV box.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175881.html

DataPlay Discs Put A New Spin On Digital Music
Compact discs are small, durable, digital and, with the right hardware, even recordable. So why wouldn't an even smaller digital music disc be a better idea? A Boulder, Colo., company called DataPlay Inc. has been working since 1998 to find an answer to that question. Its technology might make some record labels happy when it ships this summer. But consumers may not be so thrilled. But while DataPlay's developers say they have their eye on the data-storage market, they're focusing on the music business first. Songs on these discs will be encoded in a proprietary format and guarded by software limiting how many copies you can make of each song.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175880.html

Controversial copyright clause abandoned
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which publishes 30 per cent of all computer science journals worldwide, is to stop requiring authors to comply with a controversial US digital copyright law. The IEEE produced a new set of conditions for publication at the beginning of 2002. These required that authors' work must not contravene the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Many academics believe the DMCA discourages scientists from publishing valuable research through fear of legal action. The DMCA prohibits "any technology, product, service, device, component or part" that circumvents digital copy protection systems.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992169

More news later on

[walktalker]

read this before it reads YOU

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
read this before it reads YOU

It already read me!

Thanks again, WT, you're the best!

- tg

[floydian slip]

Originally posted by walktalker
Home phones losing out to cell phones?
Cordless-phone makers are pulling out all the stops to hold on to their customers. An increasing number of people with both a cell phone and a home phone are choosing to junk their landline. In response, the makers of cordless phones are going on the offensive, making their phones look and feel more like cell phones -- or even act like them. "Many people in this industry are very, very worried," said Howard Gutowitz, founder of Eatoni Ergonomics, which makes software used to enter text into cordless phones.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-882429.html

I have no phone lines in my house or connected to my house
I went wireless in 2000 and have not looked back. I will always remeber the day I cancelled SWBell, the operator was kind of angry, she said, "what are going to use for your computer?" I said, "haha I have cable." "You'll be sorry", she said. Well, like Pee Wee Herman says in Nice Dreams "IM NOT SORRY HAHA"

Originally posted by walktalker
Classroom bullies harnessing Net power
Playground bullies are harnessing the power of technology to persecute their victims around the clock, a U.K.-based children's charity warned Monday. NCH, one of the United Kingdom's leading children's charities, said the latest generation of schoolchildren is without refuge from a phenomenon that all too often drives vulnerable children to suicide -- with one in every four suffering bullying by text-message or e-mail, or in Internet chat rooms.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-882613.html

Thats crazy, How does a vulnerable retard know how to work a puter to begin with.