Top Stories for Today

News stories we're considering for tonight's The Screen Savers...

• Read their lips. House bans Internet taxes forever. Next step: US Senate.
• Like MSN, Yahoo! Messenger plans a mandatory upgrade that blocks third party access (Yahoo says it's designed to control spam). Trillian will offer patch to thwart MSN and Yahoo's attempts to close their networks.
• Jeffrey Lee Parson, the high school kid accused of creating MSBlaster variant pleads not guilty.
• More security alerts: CERT has issued a warning on the SSH flaw I mentioned on Tuesday. And IBM's DB2 has been compromised, but in this case hacker must have physical access to the machine.
• The US Commerce Department extends ICANN's charter for three more years.
• California Senator Barbara Boxer blasts Verizon and SBC for resisting RIAA subpoenas. Accuses the ISPs of "promoting illegal downloading" and engaging in "hypocritical behavior." Sen. Ron Wyden asked RIAA Prez Cary Sherman how long the suits will continue. "I really can't answer that," Sherman replied. "How many has DirecTV had to file to stop satellite piracy? They have filed more than 10,000 (lawsuits), but you don't hear much about that."
• Cell phones are a major source of infection in hospitals.
• New Demo Presidential candidate Wesley Clark says the net made him do it.
• Paramount and Fox sue DVD copy software companies.

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]

Focus Groups Never Lie

I've been re-reading George Gilder's brilliant Telecosm and I came across this telling anecdote about focus groups. In 1980 when Bob Metcalfe, inventer of ethernet, came to the industrial megacorporation General Electric on behalf of his fledgling company 3COM, the GE executives explained that they had done considerable research on the new personal computer and networking industries. In focus groups composed of GE customers held all over the country, executives were told over and over that there was no consumer interest in personal computers. PCs, the focus groups said, only were of interest to businesses. And the same could be said for networking. The was no home PC market, and never would be. General Electric decided to stick with refrigerators, nuclear reactors, and light bulbs, and to this day has never dabbled in personal computing or networking.

News for Tuesday

It's Tuesday. Merkle's Boner occured on this day in 1908 and ABC's first color TV series, The Jetsons, debuted in 1962. Happy Birthday, Bruuuuuce.

• Watch out Intel, Athlon 64 ships today. Tom's Hardware says AMD wins PR battle, but says enthusiasts are giving AMD an interest free loan until 64-bit software appears. Interesting. We'll have benchmarks tonight.
• Microsoft responds by announcing a beta test version of 64-bit Windows XP but it won't ship until the first half of 2004.
• Yahoo opens a Froogle like comparison shopping site.
• Google trials local search service on Google Labs. Enter address and search term to narrow to specific location. You get a map in the results, too!
• Microsoft settles with Massachusetts for (insert Dr. Evil look here) one million dollars to pay legal fees. Mass was the last state still holding out for harsher penalties in the DOJ vs Microsoft case.
• BMG Entertainment plans to release a copy protected compact disc today that allows consumers to download, email, and burn songs up to three times. Why three copies? SunnComm Copy protection COO William Whitmore says, "Well, we could have made it zero copies. "
• Galileo ended its 14 year mission Sunday with fiery crash onto Jupiter. Researchers hailed the craft as one of the most successful ventures in the history of space exploration.
• Now we've got a fight. Verisign says hell no we won't go.

Wednesday's News

CompuServe started on this day in 1979.

• October 14 Microsoft will close its free unsupervised MSN chat rooms. MS says it's to protect children from being targeted by pedophiles and being bombarded with pornographic messages and spam, but critics say it's purely a financial decision since paid chat rooms will continue. And, of course, there's always IRC.
• California Governor Gray Davis signs anti-spam measure. It's the strongest in the US, allowing penalties of up to $1000 per message, $1 million per campaign, to junk emailers who don't have an existing business relationship with their victims. Both spam services and the companies advertised are liable. Individuals and ISPs can also sue.Robert Wientzen, president of the Direct Marketing Association says in the New York Times, "This is a group of politicians trying to cash in on a popular issue and will create more confusion and problems than solutions." It may be unconstitutional, too, since it's an attempt by a state to regulate interstate commerce.
• Acacia Research shuts down Go Entertainment over the weekend claiming patent violations, sending a chill over the entire streaming media industry. "All the methods we have looked at for streaming audio and video over the Internet are covered by our patents," said Rob Berman, senior vice president and general counsel for the company. Acacia is demanding license fees from companies that stream media.
• Meanwhile, the EU approves software patents similar to the US over strenuous objections of Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
• HP indemnifies HP Linux users from SCO lawsuit.
• Comcast sent letters to 1% of its users this summer saying they're using too much bandwidth, but won't say what the limits are. Cox allows 2GB per day. Road Runner 40 GB per month. Possible poll question: Should there be a limit on unlimited Internet service?
• Apple pulls 10.2.8 update saying some Power Mac G4 users suffered Ethernet issues when they applied it. Worked great for me.
• Report by anti-Microsoft group led by Oracle, AOL, and Sun, says that continued reliance on Microsoft Windows threatens national security. Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer for network monitoring service Counterpane Internet Security and one of the paper's three authors says Microsoft is "using security technologies to extend [its] monopolies."