Tech News for Friday

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day. Reclaim those pirated words (like Pirate) with Word Pirates. And now the news...

• New email virus poses as patch from Microsoft. Say it with me... Don't open attachments. Especially if they claim to be from Bill Gates. This one also uses the MIME exploit to execute automatically on unpatched systems. Updated anti-virus signatures are available from most vendors already.
• Senator Sam Brownback introduces bill to repeal anti-privacy clause of DMCA. New bill says "An Internet access service may not be compelled to make available to a manufacturer of a digital media product or its representative the identity or personal information of a subscriber or user of its service" unless criminal or civil action is already pending. Currently the DMCA allows any copyright holder to demand the name and address of any Internet user without filing suit.
• Search engine Netster sues Verisign for $100 million over controversial SiteFinder redirect service (see yesterday).
• Consumers are suing Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba over misstating hard drive capacities. Companies use decimal to describe size, computers use binary so that a drive described as 160 GB really has less than 150 GB usable storage.
• Tough California anti-spam legislation awaits signature from Governor Davis. The measure bans unsolicited commercial e-mail unless the sender has a business relationship with the receiver. It covers e-mail either sent from California or to California residents. Those receiving unsolicited e-mail have the right to sue for $1,000 per message, up to $1 million.
• New York Times/CBS Poll says file sharing has dropped 5% since lawsuits. Only 36% of respondents said file sharing is always wrong. [free registration required]