Wednesday's Camouflage

Middle of the week. Here's the news. President Bush is off to Britain. Fortunately, he'll be moving faster than an unladen swallow. On this day in 1863 President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. The US Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations in 1919. Ford cancelled the Edsel in 1959. Happy birthday Ted Turner, Larry King, Jodie Foster, and Meg Ryan. Happy Anniversary Corbin and Amanda.

1. President Bush has asked the US Senate to ratify an international cybercrime treaty. Privacy advocates say the treaty goes too far and will force US ISPs to begin collecting information on their customers. It also bans hate speech, which is constitutionally protected in the US. Only Albania, Croatia, and Estonia have ratified the treaty so far.
2. AT&T has patented a way to trick spam filters. The technique, which randomly changes a spam message each time it is sent, could be used to thwart collaborative filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet. AT&T says the patent is purely a defensive measure.
3. Security firm, Internet Security Systems, says Internet attacks are getting worse, up 26% last quarter. The report also noted that the delay is shrinking between the publication of a flaw and the release of a program to exploit that flaw.
4. Job losses in the tech sector slowed this year. "Only" 234,000 people lost their job this year, compared to 539,000 last year.
5. In his Comdex keynote, Kevin Knox, director of business development for AMD, slammed Intel's Centrino products. The CPU itself is good, he said, but "the wireless technology they bundle with the chip is garbage."
6. For the first time ever, AOL has opened its instant messenger to third party developers. Early next year, Macromedia Flash programmers will be able to download a Software Development Kit (SDK) for AIM that will let them write programs that can interact with AIM data (although it doesn't look like they'll be able to write a stand-alone AIM client).
7. The man vs. machine chess tournament ended in a tie yesterday, when World Champion Garry Kasparov agreed to a draw with X3D Fritz. Each had won one game and drawn two in the four game match. There's no question now that computers are as good at chess as humans, despite Kasparov's denials.

Thursday's Sabotage

Good morning news hounds. Don't forget to join Becky Worley, Megan Morrone, and me at the Barnes and Noble in Emeryville, California this evening at 7:30! I want a robot copter I can call my own. Beats turkey flavored soda. Happy birthday Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals, born on this day in 1924. The crank pedal bicycle was patented on this day in 1866. It's World Rights of the Child Day, commemorating the 1959 UN Declaration of Children's Rights. Not in my house.

1. A federal judge has denied Wells Fargo's request to block pop-up advertising for a rival bank, saying that the pop-up ads are unlikely to confuse users. This is the second court victory for WhenU, a pop-up purveyor. They beat U-Haul in a similar case in September.
2. High demand for LCD screens is pushing prices up. Experts say prices will stay high well into next year thanks to sales of LCD TVs. LCD TV shipments are expected to double next year. If history is any indicator, the increase in prices will trigger increased production that will ultimately reduce prices considerably.
3. Projecting increased demand for its chips, AMD is breaking ground for a new $2.5 billion chip fab in Dresden. The plant goes online in 2006.
4. NASA's new supercomputer is running Linux. It'll be used to study the oceans.
5. Support the Free Software Foundation. California residents who purchased Microsoft software between 1995 and 2001 are receiving vouchers as part of the state's settlement with Microsoft. The FSF is asking Californians to donate those vouchers to support their efforts to promote free software.

Monday's Mashed Potatoes

Good morning. I'm on vacation but the news never sleeps. Did you see the total solar eclipse this morning? Don't fret, hardly anyone did. It was in Antarctica. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published on this day in 1859. AOL ended the browser wars by buying Netscape in 1998.

1. The US House of Representatives passed an anti-spam bill 392-5 early Saturday. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) creates a "do not spam" list and bans automated email harvesting. But it invalidates some stronger state laws, including California's, and makes some forms of spam legal. Spammers can send as many messages as they like as long as they're obviously ads, with real addresses and unsubscribe links. The Senate is expected to pass it this week and Bush says he will sign the bill.
2. I don't like spam either, but a Silicon Valley programmer is facing up to five years in prison for threatening a Canadian spammer with anthrax. He had received just one too many penis enlargement ads. Sounds like he was taking it personally.
3. IV at 4 in 2004: Intel says its next PIV, the Prescott, will run at 4 GHz by next year.
4. Linus releases test kernel 2.6.0-Test10, "Stoned Beaver" today.
5. Friendster fanfare is fading. According to Wired, early users are fed up with the lag time and the "Friendstapo" killing phoney entries. I killed my entry weeks ago.
6. Coming to a pet store near you in January: genetically modified zebra fish that glow red. Bred to glow in toxic waters, the fish will be the first GM animals to be sold to the public.
7. I spent the weekend downloading Debian - all seven CDs - only to learn this morning that hackers had compromised the servers last week. Guess I'll start over. We're trying to decide which distro to use on TSS now that Red Hat is dumping its free support.
8. A growing number of tech savvy young people are abandoning land lines and TV for cell phones and the Internet, according to a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Tuesday's Turkey Dinner

Help me, I'm newsing and I can't get up. The first American patent was issued on this day in 1715. It was for a corn processing technique. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1867. The first football play-by-play was broadcast by WTAW in College Station, Texas in 1920. The general theory of relativity was proven in 1976 by radio signals sent from Viking I on Mars.

1. Cell phone number portability went into effect yesterday. So far, so good according the the San Jose Mercury-News. The AP says 100,000 consumers applied on the first day, far fewer than expected. Consumers Union has set up a site, escapeCellHell.com, for tips and complaints.
2. Remember when the .13 micron process was a big deal? Now that IBM has announced a .09 micron process for the G5, Intel has gone them one better, demonstrating a .065 micron (65 nanometer) process that puts the equivalent of 10 million transistors on the head of a pin. Expect 65 nm chips from both companies by 2005 if they can solve the leakage problem.
3. Eben Moglen, General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation and Columbia University School of Law professor, has released an article that compares SCO to a "shyster" lawyer and calls their claims "irresponsibly inflated."
4. The programmer who created DeCSS to crack DVDs has issued a tool to remove copy protection from Apple's iTunes AAC encoded songs. The resulting file has no DRM but also lacks header information that makes the song playable.
5. SuSE Linux 9 is now available for free download. The company typically waits one month from the commercial release to make a free version available. The servers are currently slammed.
6. Apple's response to the Neistat Brothers' iPod's Dirty Secret video: a $99 battery replacement program. Just in time - the iPod was two years old yesterday.
7. From Slashdot comes this Tale of the Strange but True: the County of Los Angeles has asked computer vendors to stop referring to hard drives as master and slave as part of their committment "to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived."
8. Silicon Valley startup financier Gene Kleiner (of Kleiner Perkins) passed away last Thursday at the age of 80. He was instrumental in getting Fairchild Semiconductor off the ground.

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."