The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Cable: Will price tiers spark outcry?
After noticing that their online games of "EverQuest" were getting slower and slower, Jim Williamson and his 13-year-old daughter ran a speed check of his Time Warner Road Runner cable service. It was running at about half the speed they were used to, he says. Within a week, Time Warner e-mailed him an offer to "Increase your Road Runner speed!!!" by signing up for a more costly business-class service. "They never guaranteed us a set speed, so no one could complain about the loss," Williamson, of Pinellas County, Fla., wrote in an e-mail.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-885608.html

HP: Fired worker leaked company memos
Hewlett-Packard said in an e-mail to employees Wednesday that it has fired a worker who admitted to forwarding two company memos to the press. The company did not provide details on the worker, the contents of the memos or how it determined the employee's identity. In March, HP's shares slipped after a report that the head of HP's services unit sent staffers a memo discussing possible problems with the division.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-885602.html

Klez worm's on the loose again
A new variant of the Klez worm managed to squirm into computers in some parts of Asia on Tuesday and appeared to be spreading in the United States as of Wednesday. Alternately known as Klez.g, Klez.h and Klez.k, depending on the security advisory that's referring to it, the worm has its own e-mail engine to mass mail itself to potential victims, and it also attempts to deactivate some antivirus products. The worm can also spread to shared drives connected to PCs via local area networks or LANs.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-885087.html

Can search engines track down terrorists?
Some U.S. government officials engaged in the so-called war on terror would like to see privacy laws relaxed so they can get better access to e-mail and other sensitive material exchanged over the Internet. Other bureaucrats would be happy just to have a better filing system. Tracking down terrorists, after all, does not necessarily require intercepting top-secret conversations. Sometimes it is a more mundane task of making sure one government agency can share its records with another.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-885415.html

Microsoft looks to extend digital media reach
Microsoft, seeking to become a vital player in the budding world of digital media, detailed on Tuesday a host of software products intended to ensure its influence over music and video. Digital media such as MP3 music files or streams of video sent over the Internet must be created, edited, encrypted, encoded, indexed and distributed, and Microsoft has software involved in all these tasks, Amir Majidimehr, Microsoft's general manager of digital media, told hardware engineers at the company's WinHEC conference here.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-884588.html

Game sites agree to child-friendly rules
The Better Business Bureau has claimed a victory in its battle to make Web sites more child friendly. The Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the organization said Wednesday that Scan-command.com and Namcoarcade.com agreed to make changes to their sites to comply with its child-protection guidelines. CARU can solicit investigations by the Federal Trade Commission if a company continues to violate its principles or the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-885570.html

Music Services Aren't Napster, but the Industry Still Cries Foul
The record industry's legal victory over Napster last year has neither stopped the trading of free music online nor halted a slide in music sales. A new generation of free music exchanges has blossomed in place of Napster, which was forced offline by a California court in July and has yet to return. So the record companies have found themselves back in courtrooms worldwide and are facing a more complicated set of legal questions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/17/te...gy/17MUSI.html

HP to build Linux supercomputer
Hewlett-Packard announced a high-profile contract Tuesday to build a Linux-powered supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy. The $24.5 million supercomputer will be capable of processing 8.3 trillion calculations per second (8.3 teraflops), according to HP. That would place the system among the current top 10 of the world's fastest supercomputers, if it were operating today. HP expects to have the supercomputer running at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., early next year.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-884297.html?tag=cd_mh

Despite law, few people use e-signatures
Even in the Internet age, your John Hancock still matters. Most people are still putting pen to paper these days, despite a law signed by former President Clinton nearly two years ago that made electronic signatures the legal equivalent of traditional signatures. Electronic signatures were supposed to wipe out the need for time-consuming and costly efforts to sign certain documents. Bank loans, refinancing paperwork and legal documents were all targeted by backers of electronic signatures, with the idea of eliminating the need for meetings, notary publics or overnight deliveries to validate signatures.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-884544.html

Patent turns playtime into pay time
A 7-year-old Minnesota boy has patented a method for swinging side to side, meaning he could conceivably take playmates to court if they try his new trick without permission. U.S. Patent #6,368,227, issued April 9, describes a method for swinging "in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side-to-side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other." People have up until now only swung in a back-and-forth motion, or sometimes have twisted the chains so that the swing spins when unwound, the application says.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-885552.html?tag=cd_mh

Court orders ISP to pull sabotage info
German railway Deutsche Bahn has won a partial victory in its efforts to remove documents from the Internet that allegedly provide instructions for sabotaging trains. A Dutch court ordered Internet service provider XS4All to pull documents published by Radikal, a group opposed to the transportation of nuclear waste via rail. The group allegedly published instructions for sabotaging trains, known as Castor transports, by cutting overhead cable lines, among other tactics.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-885345.html?tag=cd_mh

International rulings cloud file swapping
Legal rulings on file-swapping are beginning to trickle out of courts across the globe, creating a patchwork of local laws that seek to control a technology with international reach. The Tokyo District Court last week ruled that Tokyo-based MMO Japan is prohibited from offering users its online file-swapping service, dubbed File Rogue. That decision, which marks the first court ruling in Japan on the issue, comes just weeks after a Dutch appeals court essentially rejected liability against file-swapping software maker Kazaa for distributing its code.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-885233.html?tag=cd_mh

Radio giant to offer music downloads
A new music-subscription service, carried on Clear Channel's sizable network of radio Web sites, is slated to launch Wednesday. Operated by start-up FullAudio, the long-promised service joins an increasingly crowded field of hopefuls trying to tempt Net music fans to trade in their post-Napster file-swapping services for legal music downloads. The small company is betting that distributing alongside the biggest radio corporation in the business will give it enough clout with consumers to compete with major-label-backed rivals Pressplay and MusicNet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-884504.html?tag=cd_mh

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