The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

Boing

Just how safe is Outlook 2002?
Internet privacy researcher Richard Smith released on Thursday a list of four issues that continue to undermine the security of Microsoft's Outlook 2002 and could leave the major mail program open to attack by virus writers. Although Smith called only one of the issues "critical," he said he released the list to bring the potential security hazards out into the open.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866329.html

Sax-playing Clinton worm stages attack
There's something to be said about persistence, except when it comes to virus writing. MyLife.b (w32.mylife.b@mm, also known as Caric.a) fixes bugs that plagued the original worm, MyLife.a (w32.mylife.a@mm). Besides e-mailing copies of itself to everyone included in the Windows address book, the new version includes a caricature of Bill Clinton playing a saxophone with a bra hanging out. It also executes its file-destroying payload whenever an infected computer is rebooted in an hour divisible by 8, such as 8:00 or 16:00.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866811.html

Images may replace your lousy passwords
Researchers at Microsoft are working on new types of passwords that will be easier for people to remember but harder for hackers to crack. The key -- images, which tend to make more of an impression on people than strings of text characters. Darko Kirovski, a cryptography and anti-piracy researcher at Microsoft, demonstrated a prototype password system at Microsoft offices in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866544.html

IBM beefs up office networks chip
IBM is jockeying for control of your office's network traffic with a new chip. Big Blue's Semiconductor Division on Monday will announce a new, lower-cost version of its PowerNP network processor, the PowerNP NP2G, that it says will bring new capabilities to networking equipment for such settings as local offices. The new chip, like IBM's current network processors, acts as a network traffic cop inside network hardware such as a switch by inspecting and then determining where to route data packets, bundles of data that are the basic element of communication between networked computers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-866901.html

Half scientist, half robot?
A controversial British robotics scientist has had his nervous system wired up to a computer in an experiment he hopes will eventually give paralyzed people more control over their own bodies. Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University, southern England, has had minute sensors implanted into the main nerve in his left arm and hooked up to a radio transceiver that will send and receive messages from a computer.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866872.html

Mandrake Linux policy angers members
Days after MandrakeSoft launched a controversial "club" to boost its bottom line, the Linux distributor has angered many in its user community by changing the rules of the Mandrake Club program. MandrakeSoft finalized version 8.2 of Mandrake Linux on Monday, and became the first Linux distributor to announce that it would include StarOffice 6.0, an office suite from Sun Microsystems that recently instituted fees after several years as a free download. Because of the fees from Sun, MandrakeSoft decided to allow only some Mandrake Club members to download the office software -- those paying higher fees.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866870.html

Google restores Scientology links
Google restored a Web site critical of the Church of Scientology on its Internet search engine on Thursday while free speech advocates slammed the company for removing the site in the first place. Google said the company had only removed certain pages from the site because of a copyright dispute. "Certain pages of the Xenu.net Web site were removed from our search engine earlier this week in response to a copyright infringement notification under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)," Google spokesman David Krane said in an e-mail.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866574.html

Red Hat: Microsoft scares off sales reps
Computer makers are still intimidated by Microsoft, and the Justice Department's proposed antitrust settlement would do little to change that, two computer industry executives told a federal judge Thursday. A former executive at Gateway and another from Red Hat testified that computer makers are still fearful of offering an alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system, and that Microsoft still dictates how they configure the machines they sell.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866735.html

AOL employees free to roam e-mail world
America Online, the world's most popular Internet service, seems to be losing its home-field advantage. Executives at AOL Time Warner, the parent company of AOL, are no longer requiring its many high-profile divisions to exclusively use an e-mail service developed by AOL's Netscape subsidiary. This flies in the face of a directive established last May that required all AOL Time Warner employees to use AOL technology as their corporate e-mail service.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866781.html

PlayStation 3 takes to the grid
If distributed computing can unravel the building blocks of life, it can probably help make a better version of "Crash Bandicoot." That appears to be Sony's thinking as the electronics giant moves ahead with development of the next version of its PlayStation video game console. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), an annual trade show for the creative and technological sides of the game industry, Shin'ichi Okamoto, chief technical officer for Sony Computer Entertainment, said research efforts for the PlayStation 3 are focusing on distributed computing, a method for spreading computational tasks across myriad networked computers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866388.html

DVDs send users on an Easter egg hunt
Two weekends from now, people will search for hidden Easter eggs on the lawn -- but they don't have to wait to find them inside the DVD version of "X-Men." Easter eggs in the world of technology are not trinkets covered in hard, colored shells. Those found in software applications contain a different kind of goodie, usually consisting of a hidden message or command that developers tuck away as an inside joke or tip. They range from anything as tame as a list of the often-unnamed developers who wrote the application to something more substantial, such as extra scenes in a video game.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866541.html

Google takes on supercomputing
Google has begun an experiment that could turn its modest toolbar software into a supercomputer to tackle scientific problems such as untangling genetic codes. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet search company invited 500 people to try out a new version of its toolbar that lets Windows users donate their computers' otherwise unused processing power to the Folding@home project at Stanford University. The project seeks to figure out how genetic information is converted into proteins, complex molecules whose three-dimensional structure is key to everything from fighting off a cold to transporting oxygen around the body.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-867034.html

Highest bid gets a...yellow submarine?
The Beatles sang about one, but an Arizona-based company has two of them for sale. Two yellow submarines worth $3.8 million apiece have been put on the online auction block for sale to the highest bidders. Sealed bids must be received by March 27. "We're getting a lot of interest worldwide," said Hunter Hoffmann, spokesman for Government Liquidation in the desert city of Scottsdale, Ariz. "It makes a good connection to pop culture," he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-866879.html

Man faces jail for Web sales of CDs
An Austin, Texas, man could face up to $100,000 in fines and a year in jail after pleading guilty to distributing live concert recordings of actor Russell Crowe's band over the Web, U.S. attorneys said. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California said Thursday that Billy Joe Acosta pleaded guilty to one count of criminal copyright infringement in connection with selling at least 10 copies of a live performance of the band Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts on eBay and Yahoo. He will be sentenced June 11 in federal court in San Jose, Calif.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-866809.html

The Oscars get Napsterised
AS HOLLYWOOD puts on its glad rags for the Academy Awards on Sunday March 24th, it will not be just the actors and creative types who will be indulging in an orgy of self-congratulation. The bean-counters and businessmen who really run the movie industry will be slapping each other on the back as well. The average cost of making and marketing a film fell by about 4% to $79m last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the major studios. And this happened while box-office takings in America were growing to $8.4 billion, as Americans made almost 1.5 billion trips to the movies — the highest number since 1959. Everything seems wonderful, darling. And yet a shadow stalks Tinseltown. Beneath the bonhomie the industry's leaders are increasingly nervous that Hollywood is about to be “Napsterised”.
http://www.economist.com/agenda/disp...ory_ID=1049624

Airlines bristle at sale of vouchers
eBay is at odds with the nation's airlines as they try to halt the long-standing practice of selling travel credits, just as the busy summer travel season gets under way. For years, airlines have tried to discourage passengers from selling frequent-flier miles and other incentives. The airlines have made headway in curbing the practice, but the vast reach and popularity of eBay has reinvigorated sales. An Internet marketplace such as eBay allows buyers and sellers to barter more easily than ever before.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-866398.html

Filmgoers bombard Net for sneak peek
Aliens, superheroes and space adventure trailers grabbed the attention of Internet surfers who flocked to movie sites to view exclusive Web trailers of movies that will debut this spring, audience measurement service Nielsen/NetRatings said Friday. Traffic to StarWars.com from people logging on at home jumped 97 percent to 315,000 during the week ending March 17, NetRatings said. The online trailer that features "Episode II, Attack of the Clones," which opens in theaters on May 16, was one of the top pages visited, attracting 31 percent of the site's audience. SonyPictures.com drew 286,000 Web surfers, rising 75 percent from the week prior, according to NetRatings.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-866633.html?tag=cd_mh

Anti-piracy bill finally sees Senate
A controversial bill that would ultimately require computer and consumer-electronics companies to build copyright-protection technology into their products was finally introduced in the U.S. Senate on Thursday. The so-called Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act -- once known as the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) -- first saw daylight late last year, when a draft of the proposed legislation began making Capital Hill rounds. As one of the most far-reaching proposals yet seen for protecting movies, music and software against digital piracy, it immediately drew a firestorm of debate.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-866337.html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders
America's programmers, engineers and sundry bit-heads have not yet figured out how much a new copyright bill will affect their livelihood. When they do, watch for an angry Million Geek March to storm Capitol Hill. A bill introduced this week by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) would roil the electronics industry by forcibly embedding copy protection into all digital devices, from MP3 players to cell phones, fax machines, digital cameras and personal computers. But the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) would also wreak havoc on programmers and software companies -- both those distributing code for free and those selling it.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51274,00.html

Just Don't Call It a Hacker Camp
A planned gathering in Colorado for young geeks probably won't be billed as the "Hacker Summer Camp" because of some confusion over the proper definition of the word "hacker." Denver security firm White Hat Technologies plans to teach network security methods and hacking ethics to computer-savvy teenagers at what the company had been happily referring to as a "Hacker Summer Camp." But CEO Thubten Comerford is now considering dropping the H word from the camp's description after a column in the Denver Post quoted Comerford as "admitting" the camp "could wind up teaching kids an illegal activity."
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,51240,00.html

ICRA's F______g Good Filter
The Web can be filthy, bawdy, offensive, disgusting and of course just really lame -- but Stephen Balkam, the head of an old nonprofit group that is announcing new efforts to "rate" websites, believes that the Internet can be categorized into submission. Balkam is the CEO of the Internet Content Rating Association, or ICRA, which people like to pronounce as "IKE-ra." The group says its main aim is to protect kids who use the Internet from adult-oriented material, while at the same time protecting free speech.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51252,00.html

Bush wants to allow records to be shared without permission
The Bush administration has proposed changing some of the federal rules designed to protect the confidentiality of Americans' medical records, including the ability of patients to decide in advance who should be able to use their personal health information. The proposal would alter a federal safeguard adopted by the Clinton administration that compels patients to give written permission before their records may be disclosed to doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and insurance companies.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...2/MN129378.DTL

Bush Touts 'Smart' Border for the U.S. and Mexico
President Bush vowed Thursday to create a "smart border" with Mexico, saying he wants to speed the flow of people and goods across the frontier but target would-be terrorists and those who smuggle drugs and immigrants into the United States. The joint initiative with Mexico seeks to develop a "biometric" ID system -- using such identifying characteristics as fingerprints or retina scans -- for frequent travelers from both countries that would let them use commuter lanes at high-volume border crossings.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...s%2Dtechnology

Lord of the Robots
In the not-too-distant future, a lot more people may be living with technologies that Brooks’s lab is developing. To help make pervasive computing a reality, researchers in his lab and MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science are developing — in an effort Brooks codirects called Project Oxygen — the requisite embeddable and wearable devices, interfaces and communications protocols. Others are building better vision systems that do things like interpret lip movements to increase the accuracy of speech recognition software.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/qa0402.asp

Study Says Political Candidates Not Using Web
U.S. congressional candidates aren't taking full advantage of the Internet as a campaign tool, according to a new study. Only 29 percent of the incumbent Senators and Representatives up for election in 2002 have clearly marked 2002 campaign Web sites, according to a study by the Washington D.C.-based Bivings Group. The Bivings Group, an online communications company that builds and operates political campaign sites, conducted its review of political campaign sites online, by searching under the names of incumbent candidates, Bivings spokesman Damien Del Porto said today.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175417.html

Appeals Court OKs Lawsuits Served By E-mail
E-mail is an acceptable way for lawyers to file lawsuits and serve legal documents, a federal appeals court ruled this week. In a landmark ruling Wednesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided that a Las Vegas casino could legally serve lawsuit papers via e-mail on an offshore Internet gambling operation with no physical address. The court refers to serving legal papers as "service of process."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175414.html

Encryption patent firm stakes claim on industry
A previously unknown Californian firm which has obtained a patent for application-independent file encryption is seeking to enforce licensing from other companies in the security industry. The move has spurred anger among vendors hit by patent infringement claims; they say they will contest the action vigorously. Maz Technologies was granted a patent last year for a "method of transparent encryption and decryption for an electronic document management system". Recently the company appointed lawyers to press its claims.
http://www.theregus.com/content/4/24421.html

Cellphones more dangerous than drunk driving
Using a cell phone while driving is more dangerous than being drunk behind the wheel, according to new research released today. Boffins at the Transport Research Laboratory in Berkshire, UK found that driving is impaired more by using a mobile phone than by being over the legal alcohol limit. The results found that drivers' reaction times were, on average, 30 per cent slower when talking on a hand-held mobile phone compared to being drunk - and nearly 50 per cent slower than under normal driving conditions.
http://www.theregus.com/content/5/24413.html

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders
America's programmers, engineers and sundry bit-heads have not yet figured out how much a new copyright bill will affect their livelihood. When they do, watch for an angry Million Geek March to storm Capitol Hill. A bill introduced this week by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) would roil the electronics industry by forcibly embedding copy protection into all digital devices, from MP3 players to cell phones, fax machines, digital cameras and personal computers. But the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) would also wreak havoc on programmers and software companies -- both those distributing code for free and those selling it.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51274,00.html

Let's hope that this madness will be quickly and determinedly rejected... Knowing the present nazi attitudes of the entertainment industry it is understandable that their paid senators try to push legislation like this but should it really go through... it would be a major catastrophe for both the US hardware & software industries. I just can't see it happening - there are too strong industrial and economical interests at risk and in direct conflict with it. Hollywood may be influential but it is hardly that influental.

Thanks for the news, Mr. Newsman!

- tg