Wednesday Wishbone

Last news before Turkey Day. Mathematician and father of Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, was born in 1894. Peanuts creator, Charles Schulz, was born in 1922. France became the third space power in 1965 with the launch of the Asterix-1.

1. A Danish security company is warning users of IE 6 (which is nearly everyone) to turn off Active Scripting or use a different browser. A Chinese security researcher discovered five cross-site scripting vulnerabilities which would allow hackers to compromise affected PCs. The question now is whether Microsoft will break its new monthly update policy to offer a fix. The company is investigating.
2. Don't rush to use Opera instead, however. Versions 7 to 7.22 of Opera have two security flaws that could also give hackers access to your PC. The company has released an upgrade to 7.23 and recommends that all users download it. I say stick with open source: Mozilla is looking better all the time.
3. Some hackers prefer to use social engineering. According to Sophos, a new Trojan, sysbug-A, is being distributed as an attachment to a "saucy" email from a man who apologizes for not using a Trojan. He claims to be sending nude pix of Mary. You know the drill. Don't open attachments!
4. The Senate approved the CAN-SPAM act yesterday, now all that remains is for Bush to sign the bill into law, which he has promised to do. It's not the bill many of us had hoped for, but it's better than nothing.
5. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are seeking permanent anti-trust exemption. Senator Orrin Hatch has introduced the EnFORCE Act: Enhancing Federal Obscenity Reporting and Copyright Enforcement Act of 2003 (how much time is wasted by Senate staffers working up these strained acronyms?) which includes a provision to offer permanent immunity to the kind of antitrust lawsuits filed by webcasters against the RIAA two months ago. Hatch says the protection is required by "market realities." Hunh?
6. Having cell phone problems? AT&T Wireless's glitches continue. A software bug has been causing delayed connections and other issues. It prevented customers from switching carriers on Monday when number portability went into effect. How convenient.
7. Andrew Morton says Linux kernel 2.6.10 is the last beta version. Expect 2.6 final in the second half of December. Commercial distros will incorporate the new kernel in early 2004. (Incidentally, I installed SuSE 9 last night using the 21 MB boot.iso and a network install and it came up beautifully. The YaST installer is the best I've used. And it recognized all the hardware that Red Hat 9 did not. It comes with Open Office and Ximian, defaults to KDE 3.1, and recognized all my NTFS partitions, too. Two thumbs up.)
8. Now that Vivendi has sold the domain name MP3.com to c|net, it plans to destroy all the files on the old MP3.com servers. Michael Robertson, the founder and former owner, is trying to save what he calls "the largest collection of digital works ever assembled."

Thursday Thrombosis

The news is back, baby.

1. The RIAA is at it again. 41 more lawsuits went out yesterday, another 90 received warning letters. Some file sharers have been deterred, Nielsen Net Ratings says there's been a 53% drop in Kazaa users since the lawsuits started in June. But some sharers are unconcerned. USA Today quotes an Indiana University student who writes "The odds of being struck by lightning are about 90 times greater [than being sued], but I still go out in the rain."
2. Hewlett-Packard will announce a new hard drive based MP3 player at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and will launch its own music download service to go with it. The company also plans a line of digital TVs. HP is following in the footsteps of Del and Gateway who have also moved aggressively into consumer electronics.
3. There's a security flaw in Yahoo! Instant Messenger. The buffer overflow exploit could open systems to hacks. Yahoo is working on a patch.
4. Gartner says the new CAN-SPAM Act won't deter spammers. The new federal law overrides 36 state laws, most of which are more effective and offshore spammers will be unaffected.
5. Meanwhile, Microsoft has issued an "unreserved apology" to a British man the company accused of spamming, showing how difficult it can be to determine the identity of spammers.
6. AOL is offering a PC for $299 to new users who sign up with the service for a year or more. The 1.7 GHz Celeron based "AOL optimized" system includes a monitor and color printer, but you can do better at Fry's.
7. Microsoft is planning to charge a license fee for any company shipping FAT formatted devices.
8. The National Review is predicting that a speech by President Bush to commemorate the centenary of flight on December 17 will call for a return to the moon. Hoo rah!

Monday's Meander

Tiptoeing through today's timely tulips... Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, was born on this day in 1765. Coaxial cable was patented in 1931. Jim Morrison would have been 60. John died 23 years ago today. Imagine.

1. Microsoft is retiring Windows 98 December 15, claiming it necessary for compliance with a 2001 court order in the dispute with Sun over Java. Other Java enabled products that will be pulled from the shelves include SQL Server 7, Office XP Developer, and a number of Office 2000-related tools and patches.
2. Yahoo is proposing a new, open, mail authentication system that would virtually eliminate anonymous spam if the big emailers adopted it. This is the system our entire panel supported on Friday's Spam Attack Open Mike. Bravo Yahoo!
3. IBM wins one. In a preliminary hearing in the SCO vs. IBM case, a Utah judge has approved two motions from IBM asking for more information. SCO now has 30 days to explain exactly how IBM and Linux have infringed on SCO's copyrights.
4. Kazaa is using the DMCA to try to shutdown the illicit Kazaa Lite K++. Sharman Networks, creators of the real Kazaa, is apparently contacting ISPs of servers that host K++ for download, threatening them with prosecution under the DCMA. Of course, you could probably find the program on P2P networks like, say, Kazaa.
5. IBM will present a paper today claiming that they've found a way to use "molecular self-assembly" to build semiconductors. Interesting. That's how I put on my hairpiece every morning.
6. Google is asking a US court to rule on whether keyword ads are a trademark violation. American Blind and Wallpaper has threatened the Internet search engine with a lawsuit because it popped up competitors' ads when users searched for American Blind.
7. Yahoo has patched the flaw in Messenger we told you about last week. Download the new version from http://messenger.yahoo.com/messenger/security.

Tuesday's Tiggywinkle

Stand by for tech news... Eat your niblets, Clarence Birdseye was born on this day in 1886. Admiral Grace Hopper was born in 1906. Malkovich is 50. It's Worf's birthday, too. He'll be born in 2340. Doug Englebart demonstrated the first mouse at SRI on this day in 1968.

1. The House has passed the CAN-SPAM Act. President Bush is expected to sign it into law before the end of the year.
2. Even ATMs are vulnerable to worms... if they're running Windows. According to SecurityFocus.com, ATMs from two banks were hit by the Nachi worm in August and we're just learning about it now. The question is, why the hell are they running Windows?
3. Coca-Cola is launching its own music download service next year. Who's next? Midas Muffler?
4. The new version of AdSubtract, a popular web ad blocking program, will block paid search results, as well.
5. Steve Jobs tells Rolling Stone, "we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content" and there's "this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property, called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet." So how'd he talk the music industry into supporting the iTunes Music Store? "We don't see how you convince people to stop being thieves unless you can offer them a carrot -- not just a stick. And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song." Interesting interview. The first he's done in a long time.
6. That buck a song may be history soon. Consumers would like it to be lower, but music industry execs speaking at Monday's iHollywood Forum’s Music 2.0 conference said they couldn't afford to go lower, despite the fact that surveys show consumers would buy more at 79 cents a song.

Thursday's Threat Assessment

It's news time. FCC Chairman, Michael Powell, joins us today on The Screen Savers. The Concorde SST was first shown on this day in 1967. A Federal judge ordered Microsoft not to bundle IE4 in Windows in 1997.

1. SCO's site is down again, the victim of a massive DDoS attack. The corporate email, intranet, and customer support operations were also brought down. Several thousand computers were used in the SYN flood.
2. AT&T has followed Time-Warner in announcing that it will offer Internet phone calling to its broadband customers. The VoIP service will roll out to three East coast markets first eventually expanding to 100 markets and 1 million consumers. VoIP grew 80% globally last year, carrying 11% of all international phone calls.
3. Can you lose money in the Wi-Fi biz? Apparently Intel can. The company is taking an "embarassing" $600 million charge on its wireless chips. It announced yesterday that it's reorganizing the division. The chief reason for the write-down: sluggish sales on Intel's wireless chipset.
4. It's going to be a green Christmas. Online shoppers spent a record $8.5 billion last month - an increase of 55% from the year before. Books, DVDs, and music led the sales.
5. Microsoft's gift to you this holiday season: no December Windows Update. Is it because there are no security flaws to fix? No. A new flaw in Internet Explorer makes it easy to spoof web sites. So the next time you're redirected to a phony EBay site, let's say, to extract your credit card number, the fake site can stuff Ebay's URL in the address bar making it indistinguishable from the real deal. Microsoft is looking into the report, saying that security firm Secunia should have notified them before publicizing the bug.
6. A flaw in Yahoo! Mail that allowed malicious code to launch automatically when messages were opened has been fixed. A similar bug in Hotmail was corrected last week. In both cases, security firm Finjan discovered the flaw.
7. Fortune Magazine named the iTunes Music Store its Product of the Year.
8. It's the end of line for the Jenni cam. Jenni Ringley, the woman who paved the way for, well, you know, has decided to shut down her site at the end of the year. Apparently PayPal is closing her account due to "frontal nudity" and if you can't make a buck, what's the point? Fortunately, you can still get your frontal nudity at Chris Pirillo's Rent My Chest.
9. Researchers have used the Hot or Not web site to prove that pretty women scramble men's brains. Or at least their ability to plan for the future. Women, however, were unaffected by good looking men.