Top News for 9/16

Every day I prepare a news summary for The Screen Savers consideration at our morning meeting. Patrick and our web producer, Tim Moynihan, do the same. Then we duke it out until we agree on two or three stories for the show that night. Here's my list for today..

• Apple finally ditches Titanium and announces its new aluminum 1.25 GHz 15 inch Powerbooks. Revs up 12 inch notebooks to one GHz. 17 inchers to 1.33 GHz. Jobs says 42% of Apples sold last quarter were laptops. At least they had the decency to wait a few months after I bought mine.
• Microsoft announces new 802.11g gear, including an Xbox to Wi-Fi bridge.
• Xbox Live autoupdate breaks Xbox Linux installer. Coincidence?
• New SSH exploit seen in the wild. Turn off SSH or restrict it to known IPs until patched.
• US Court of Appeals in DC today reviews RIAA victory over Verizon in file swapping subpoena case. Verizon says DMCA subpoenas don't apply since copyright violating song were kept on users computers, not ISP's. If subpoenas are found to be unlawful, RIAA could be subject to severe penalties.
• Adrian Lamo explains what "faith manages" means in interview with c|net. (No mention of Babylon 5.) Says he's going to go to school part time, Mitnick and Poulsen are not his role models.
• White House appoints Symantec VP, Amit Yoran, cybersecurity czar replacing Richard Clarke. Yoran says Symantec will get no special consideration from Department of Homeland Security.
• Ballmer says Microsoft has to block viruses before they get on PCs. Blah blah blah. Spin spin spin. "There is still a lot of work ahead of us," he said. (No kidding.) "In the old West, the banks didn't shut down when there were robberies. They improved the banks. They improved the law enforcement."
• War is as old as villages, according to Mexican archeologists.
• (Returning from yesterday): Pilots say portable electronic devices call all sorts of problems in flight
• Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Ralph Lauren team up to make Porsche 959 street legal in US. Bill suggests crash testing a few to get Fed approval! (We should try to get Bruce Canepa of Canepa Design in Santa Cruz on the show. But he has to bring a 959!)