Tuesday Toonage

Today's news, now with podcaster flavor. (Download the five minute audio version as a 1MB MP3 or subscribe to the RSS audio feed.) Congratulations to our three new Nobel Laureates. David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek, researchers at UCSB, the California Institute of Technology and MIT respectively, won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their exploration of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus. Steve Jobs is back to work at Apple after his successful cancer surgery. Ray Kroc was born on this day in 1902. Space Cowboy Steve Miller is 61. The first World Series radio broadcast was on this day in 1921. PBS became a network in 1970.

1. Original Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper passed away yesterday at his home in Ventura. He was 77. He is survived by three of the original seven Right Stuff astronauts: John Glenn, Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra.
2. Bill Gates told a crowd in Silicon Valley that Microsoft is working on its own anti-spyware program. Gates finally admitted that the naive Windows security model doesn't work: "We thought that if we told users: 'This might be dangerous, think about it,' that people would think about it." But users ended up receiving so many warnings that they started to ignore them altogether, he said. Gates finally realized the scope of the problem when he was forced to remove spyware from his home computer. How long before he installs Linux at home?
3. AT&T is looking on doing it at work. The company is testing Linux to replace Windows on its 70,000 PCs. CIO Hossein Eslambolchi said "We have had more viruses attacking PCs in the last six months than in the previous 10 years.'' He'll make a decision by the end of next year.
4. Meanwhile security experts are worried that a proposed feature in Microsoft's next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, will make writing viruses even easier. Microsoft Shell is a powerful new scripting language which will allow developers or administrators to configure Windows systems using text commands and scripts. Microsoft says its security model will prevent viruses from using the shell. See story two above.
5. Here's a new way to make money with spam. There's a scam e-mail going around which uses a bogus US presidential poll to con you out of $1.99 a minute. The junk e-mail invites people to dial a premium rate number to express their support for President George W Bush. The poll is phony - the call (to the Czech Republic) costs $2 a minute.
6. Can't wait to get home to buy a song? AT&T has opened a music store for mobile phone users. Don't know the name of the song? Hold the phone close to a speaker and the Music ID will tell you it's name and allow you to buy it. 99 cents a song. $10 per CD. You can download the song when you get home.