The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

States: MS pushed for Linux attack
A Microsoft executive urged the company to quietly retaliate against supporters of the rival Linux operating system in an August 2000 memo that nine states still suing the software giant want admitted as evidence. The nine states seeking stiff antitrust sanctions against Microsoft late on Monday asked the judge in the case to reconsider her decision that shielded Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates from the e-mail message during his testimony last month.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-913219.html

Troubled Napster loses CEO
Napster Chief Executive Konrad Hilbers is stepping down, capping months of unsuccessful negotiations to sell the file-swapping company and settle lawsuits hanging over its business. The company may also be close to filing for bankruptcy, according to at least one source close to Napster. In an e-mail to the company Tuesday, Hilbers confirmed that a last-ditch attempt to sell the company outright to German media giant Bertelsmann had fallen through after opposition from Napster's quarrelling board of directors.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-913577.html

Cell phones morph into modems
Cingular Wireless on Tuesday joined the growing number of U.S. wireless carriers betting that people will use their cell phones to connect laptops or personal digital assistants to the Internet. The service, which debuts in June, will be available to Cingular customers with wireless Web-enabled phones, the company said. Most subscribers, however, will have to buy new software and a cable to use the service. The carrier said it plans to begin selling those items soon. Customers of Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless can already use their cell phones as modems by using the somewhat cumbersome method of attaching a phone with a cable.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-913589.html

Sony PS2 cuts put the heat on Microsoft
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will launch new campaigns in the game console wars next week, with the main weapons this time involving online gaming and price cuts. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, the game industry's main trade show, kicks off May 22 in Los Angeles. Games are the premier attraction at E3, with publishers showing off every title they plan to release during the coming year. Highlights this year range from previews of potential blockbusters such as "Doom III" to a video jigsaw puzzle featuring Penthouse's Miss April.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-912854.html

War on cybercrime -- we're losing
The nightmare for Ecount, an online gift certificate service, began last year when a hacker broke in to the company's system and stole personal information belonging to its customers. Nine months later, the criminal is still at large. The thief has brazenly taunted executives with repeated e-mails while staying ahead of investigators, deftly wiping away his electronic fingerprints and covering his tracks at every turn. "We're sick to death of hearing from him," Ecount Chief Executive Matt Gillin said of the intruder, who has offered to return the information for a fee.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-912780.html

Sonicblue doesn't want to be a snitch
Sonicblue on Monday requested the reversal of a recent court order requiring the company to track the activities of subscribers to its digital video recording service. Sonicblue's ReplayTV recorders and digital video recording (DVR) service allow consumers to record live TV shows, store them on a hard drive, skip commercials, and send TV shows to other ReplayTV owners over the Internet. Entertainment companies filed suit against Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sonicblue, claiming that distributing shows infringes on copyright laws.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-912883.html

Net firms turning to tradition in advertising
Having long sought to set the Internet apart from traditional advertising media, the online industry is now fighting to close the perception gap that it helped create. While the feeble status of Net advertising can largely be blamed on the dot-com bust, some of its lingering problems hang on the disconnect between ways of measuring the performance of offline and online media. For example, ad buyers steeped in the vernacular of print, outdoor and broadcast media still don't understand how to reach a specific audience on the Internet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-913619.html?tag=fd_top

Sony to send songs via Scour
Sony Music Entertainment, one of the companies that sued Scour Exchange to the brink of extinction, will now use the service to promote some of its artists. CenterSpan Communications, which bought Scour's assets in bankruptcy court last year, said Tuesday that Sony would promote music from Macy Gray, B2K, Five for Fighting, Flickerstick, and John Mayer through the service, which has been revamped and souped up to include multiple layers of security and digital rights management to prevent theft.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-913534.html?tag=fd_top

Firm sheds new light on keyboard design
Call it typing the light fantastic. Start-up Virtual Devices has developed a flashlight-size gadget that projects an image of a keyboard on any surface and lets people input data by typing on the image. The company's Virtual Keyboard is designed for anyone who's become frustrated with trying to peck information into a handheld but doesn't want to schlepp a notebook computer around. It uses cameras to track the location of a person's fingers in relation to a map of a full-sized keyboard. The company announced the device Tuesday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-913497.html?tag=fd_top

'Screen Language': The New Currency for Learning
John Seely Brown has had an epiphany. In the past year and a half, the knowledge expert and chief scientist of Xerox Corporation said he's gained a new respect — indeed an awe — for screen language. And what is screen language? It's simply the vernacular of digital culture, the way technology is increasingly put in the service of human imagination in sophisticated ways. For the shorthand version, just think of any teenager's natural affinity for instant messaging, video games, movies, open source, and eBay. How can that affinity be tapped and how can those abilities be understood and applied to lifelong learning?
http://hbsworkingknowledge.hbs.edu/p...=0&t=knowledge

Spintronics
As rapid progress in the miniaturization of semiconductor electronic devices leads toward chip features smaller than 100 nanometers in size, device engineers and physicists are inevitably faced with the looming presence of quantum mechanics. Pragmatists in the semiconductor device world are busy conjuring up ingenious ways to avoid the quantum world by redesigning the semiconductor chip within the context of "classical" electronics. Yet some of us believe that we are being offered an unprecedented opportunity to define a radically new class of device that would exploit the idiosyncrasies of the quantum world to provide unique advantages over existing information technologies.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/20...awschalom.html

Museum's Cyberpeeping Artwork Has Its Plug Pulled
An Internet-based artwork in an exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art was taken offline on Friday because the work was conducting surveillance of outside computers. It is not clear yet who is responsible for the blacking out — the artists, the museum or its Internet service provider — but the action illuminates the work's central theme: the tension between public and private control of the Internet. The shutdown also shows how cyberspace's gray areas can enshroud museums as they embrace the evolving medium.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/ar...gn/13ARTS.html

Latest privacy threat: Monitor glow
Law enforcement and intelligence agents may have a new tool to read the data displayed on a suspect's computer monitor, even when they can't see the screen. Marcus Kuhn, an associate professor at Cambridge University in England, presented research Monday showing how anybody with a brawny PC, a special light detector and some lab hardware could reconstruct what a person sees on the screen by catching the reflected glow from the monitor. The results surprised many security researchers gathered here at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Symposium on Security and Privacy because they had assumed that discerning such detail was impossible.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-912785.html?tag=cd_mh

Cingular phones steered away from porn
Customers of Cingular Wireless are being prevented from viewing Web pages containing "objectionable material," such as pornography, on their cell phones, according to two sources inside the company. Not that wireless Internet customers are missing much; porn images viewed on a cell phone are so pixelated it's tough to tell a nude from a smudge. Sites can be blocked using a Web filter, software that scours Web pages requested by customers of the company's wireless Internet service. With filters, if certain words are found, the page will be blocked from view.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-913248.html

Yahoo: No police presence in searches
Web giant Yahoo and several Internet trade associations have filed papers seeking to overturn a court ruling that they said could fill the offices of Internet companies with police officers overseeing the execution of search warrants. In an amici curiae brief filed with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis on Monday, the Internet group said a Minnesota court ruling requiring police officers to be physically present for search warrants would threaten client privacy, slow the searches, and disrupt business.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-913104.html?tag=cd_mh

Apple: Play music at your own risk
Mac users may want to check the labels on their music CDs twice, as copy-protected audio discs flooding the market may lead to serious problems when they are played on some computer systems. Since copy-protected discs are not standard CDs, Apple Computer says they are not meant to be played on its products. In addition, repairs required to undo damage caused by such discs may not be covered by its warranties. "Apple designs its CD drives to support media that conforms to (published Compact Disc) standards," Apple said in a report recently posted on its Web site.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-912695.html?tag=cd_mh

Supreme Court Volleys on COPA
Online pornographers, smut-peddlers, and purveyors of fine flesh, look out. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court reopened the question of how age-old laws against obscenity should apply to the Internet. The justices' views became public in a case involving erotic websites deemed unsuitable for minors but acceptable for adults. In an 8-1 decision, they voted to send the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) back to an appeals court for additional proceedings.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52504,00.html

Spielberg in the Twilight Zone
Steven Spielberg, as even he will tell you, makes two kinds of movies. There are his films that play with the future, and there are those that star the past. On a warm afternoon in Pasadena, he's shuttling between the two - he's taking a break from shooting Catch Me If You Can, set in the mid-1960s, to talk about Minority Report, which opens June 21. Based on a short story by science fiction's tender, dystopian ironist Philip K. Dick, Report unfurls in a near future where murderers are caught before they do the deed. This breakthrough in crime fighting is powered by the revelations of psychically gifted humans called precogs.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html

Piracy: The Star Wars Solution
Star Wars and other larger-than-life movies have given Hollywood the ultimate weapon against digital piracy: They make people want to go to the movie theater. The music industry continues its mighty struggle against online file-sharing networks, but the movie industry has seemingly overcome that battle. Ticket sales are at an all-time high. Spider-Man took in more money in its opening weekend than any film in history. Advance ticket sales for Star Wars have caused traffic to online ticket sellers to jump 150 percent.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,52468,00.html

Another Run to a Deep-Link Suit
Add a major magazine publisher to the ranks of websites peeved about "deep links" to their articles. Rodale Press, the publisher of Runner's World magazine and many other prominent health-oriented publications, sent a stiff note to a hobbyist website this week, demanding it delete a hyperlink to a "printer-friendly" version of a runnersworld.com article or -- face the consequences. Allen Tullar, an attorney representing the Emmaus, Pennsylvania-based publisher, gave the LetsRun.com site until the end of the day Tuesday to comply, saying otherwise, "My client will pursue its rights" under federal copyright law.
http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,52514,00.html

Scientists Get Atoms Ready for a Close-Up
Scientists at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs have developed a microscopy technique that can zoom in on individual atoms within a chunk of silicon. This is a big deal, in a minuscule way. Scientists previously were able to take pictures of individual atoms only when they were sticking out on the surface. Dr. David Muller, the Bell Labs physicist who led the research team, gave this analogy for the new work: If a typical eight-inch-long silicon wafer — the raw material that gets carved in computer chips — were scaled up to the size of the United States, then a single transistor would be size of a car, and an atom would be the size of a pinhead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/sc...al/14SCAN.html

Supercomputer lets researchers study material failures, atom by atom
One of the world's most powerful supercomputers, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has been trained like a microscope on one of the smallest but most important technological problems of our time: how materials crack and deform. These failures in everything from metals to concrete cost the United States economy $388 billion in 1999, by one estimate -- about 4 percent of the gross national product. They can also be deadly, causing bridges to collapse and planes to crash. Scientists have worked for decades to understand and prevent them.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/3259060.htm

Starship dream moves closer
The first attempt to fly a craft pushed by the light of the Sun is on target for an autumn launch.
Experts at the American space agency (Nasa) and the European Space Agency will be watching closely to see if the low-budget mission succeeds. In a privately sponsored venture, the Planetary Society in the United States wants to send a solar sailing ship into orbit around the Earth. The experiment could pioneer a new generation of space travel using spacecraft that are propelled by the our star's energy in the same way that ships on the sea are pushed by the wind.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1984793.stm

Weapons of Precise Destruction
Saddam Hussein has not been seen publicly for the past year. He did not attend his recent 65th birthday celebration, despite the fact that young girls were dressed as suicide bombers — a sight that he must have hated to miss. But he has good reason to fear the outdoors. A Predator may be lurking there, patiently waiting for its intended prey — him. The Predator, with a capital P, is a new weapon in the United States arsenal, although it is based on nearly a century of development. It is revolutionary, not because it is new, but because of a combination of technologies that has suddenly transformed a supplementary system, previously used for target practice and spying, into what may be the U.S. weapon of choice for the 21st century.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/wo_muller051002.asp

More news later on :

[theknife]

Sources close to the company also said that Shawn Fanning, who created the Napster software at age 19, also resigned Tuesday.

And the Philo T. Farnsworth of P2P begins his slow spiral into obscurity....

who wants to be the first to saY "I told you so"?




ok, I will.