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April 1, 2003
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States Halt Smallpox Shots
The House worked Monday to establish payments for people injured by the smallpox vaccine, as the program was suspended in seven states amid questions about the vaccine's role in three heart attack deaths.
Democrats complained that the GOP-written compensation bill was not generous enough to persuade health-care workers and others to sign up for the vaccine, which carries rare but serious risks. Republicans were invoking special rules and needed a two-thirds majority to get their bill approved, and it was unclear if they would succeed.
Everyone involved in the government's smallpox program believes it imperative that Congress establishes a fund to pay compensation for those injured or killed by the vaccine. The number of people volunteering for the shot is well below what was expected, partly because of concerns that injured people won't be compensated for medical expenses, lost work time and other expenses.
The program also has suffered from questions about the relationship between the vaccine and heart problems after three people died of heart attacks after being inoculated. While experts suspect the vaccine is probably not to blame, seven states -- Arizona, California, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, New York and Vermont -- have suspended their programs during an investigation. An eighth state, Idaho, recommended that that local health districts temporarily suspend vaccinations.
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Goodbye to the classic Apple iMac
The computer that came in different hues and revolutionised the home computing market - not to mention Apple's fortune - is finally being phased out.
Consider the desktop computer. For years these instruments of social change could not have looked less revolutionary if their designers had tried.
Instead of anonymous beige boxes, users yearned for something less like an oversized box and more like an implement fit for the 21st Century.
Something like the Apple iMac, for instance. When the company first unveiled its new, blue model in 1998, the iMac was an instant hit.
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'Nanowire' breakthrough hailed
Microscopic wires which could help form the miniature technology of the future have been constructed using the basic building blocks of living things.
The human body is one of the ultimate examples of a self-assembly machine, with every part a complex arrangement of intricately-folded proteins.
Scientists are only just beginning to understand how this is achieved.
Experts in nanotechnology, who are trying to come up with ways of wiring the next generation of microscopic electronic circuits, believe that protein folding could hold the key to progress.
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Al-Jazeera site tackles hackers
The English version of the website for Arab news channel al-Jazeera's is still experiencing problems following a series of hack attacks.
The site has been the subject of several hack attacks since it went live last month.
But the service is now stabilising and al-Jazeera does not expect farther disruption.
"Fingers crossed that it is back up and running properly in the next few days," Newsroom coordinator Susie Sirri told BBC News Online.
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Sweden beats U.S. as top Web-savvy nation
Sweden has overtaken the United States as the Web-savviest nation on the planet, a survey showed on Tuesday.
One other European country, Denmark, was also more aggressive in taking advantage of the Internet than the United States, according to research carried out by IBM and the intelligence unit of British magazine The Economist.
Of the 60 countries surveyed, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were at the bottom of the list with 2.37 and 2.52 points respectively out of a possible 10.
Sweden scored 8.67, up from 8.32 a year ago. The United States was little changed at number three with 8.43 points, on par with the Netherlands and Britain.
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Teen faces new trial in piracy case
A Norwegian court will retry a teen whose DVD-copying exploits made him a hero to hackers worldwide, in a case that will be closely monitored by Hollywood.
In January, an Oslo court acquitted 19-year-old Jon Johansen of charges that he developed a computer program that enabled mass copying of movies on DVDs.
Hollywood studios accused Johansen of developing the software and posting his findings on the Internet.
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Salon Gets an $800,000 Lifeline
Salon Media Group, the publisher of online culture and politics site Salon, said on Friday it received an $800,000 round of funding that would give it the needed breathing room to reach profitability.
The funding, led by previous investors Bill Hambrecht and John Warlock, is on top of $1.3 million Salon has raised since last July. The company said the funds would allow it to continue its march to self-sufficiency, which is keyed on its new hybrid subscription and sponsorship model.
In January, Salon closed the gates on its site, forcing readers to either pony up for a subscription or earn a "day pass" by watching a multi-screen Internet ad.
Salon instituted its subscription program in April 2001, giving access only to readers paying a minimum of $18.50 a year for access to the site with ads and $30 for ad-free viewing. Non-subscribers, however, still had access to about 80 percent of Salon's content.
In November 2001, after signing up 50,000 subscribers, Salon experimented with a day pass, using rich media "Ultramercials" to give readers a chance to sample the site's premium content. Mercedes-Benz was the first Ultramercial advertiser, showing a four-screen ad for its E Class sedan.
Since then Salon said 14 advertisers, including The Discovery Channel, Infiniti, HBO and American Express, have signed on to run day-pass sponsorship campaigns. The site now has a total of 60,000 subscribers with a 72 percent annual renewal rate.
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W3C to combine Web specs
The Web's leading standards body has advanced a specification that makes it easier to combine two increasingly popular technologies for building Web documents.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) issued on Monday the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 XPath Specification as a candidate recommendation, the penultimate phase in the consortium's recommendation process.
The new candidate recommendation marries two established technologies, DOM and XPath, the W3C said.
The DOM, which became a recommendation in 1998 and has undergone several updates since then, is the W3C's application programming interface (API) that lets programs and scripting languages such as JavaScript act on individual elements of a Web page. XPath, first recommended in 1999, is the consortium's way of addressing a specific part of an XML document.
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Shock tactics for anti-social mobile use
Anti-social mobile phone users could be punished with an electric shock if prototypes from a design company go into production.
The increasing irritation of inappropriate or noisy conversations in public places prompted design firm Ideo to come up with handsets that would encourage people to be more tactful in their phone use.
The designs are not intended to make it on to the high street but rather to prompt debate about the social impact of mobile phones.
Designs include a phone with two metal plates attached that could send an increasing electric shock to people at the other end depending on how loudly the caller is talking.
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Wall Street Frets at Google IPO Stall
Laziness was crowned king last week in Mountain View, Calif., the home of Internet search pioneer Google. And, thanks to King Laziness, we won't be seeing an initial public offering from Google any time soon.
"Thus far, laziness has always won out. There are so many better things to do," Google co-founder and technology head Sergey Brin told the PC Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz.
What those "better things" are, no one is sure about. But Brin's comments caused consternation on Wall Street, where a Google IPO had been widely expected to herald a new age of Internet-company investment.
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Data thieves strike Georgia Tech
Online intruders broke into a server containing the credit card numbers of some 57,000 patrons of a Georgia Institute of Technology arts and theater program, a university official said Monday.
The online intrusions, which are thought to have occurred over the last two months, were only discovered in the past week or so, said David Terraso, a Georgia Tech spokesman. Both the Georgia Bureau of Investigations--an independent resource for the state's law enforcement personnel--and the FBI have started investigating the matter, he said.
"We sent out an e-mail to the people affected," Terraso said. He referred further questions to a Georgia Tech Information Security Center representative who wasn't immediately available for comment.
The break-in came shortly after Georgia Tech became the first university in the state to do away with reliance on Social Security numbers. As of March 1, the university stopped using Social Security numbers as the primary way to track student data, according to the school's Web site.
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Hackers Condemn Arab Site Hack
Don't blame hackers for the attacks that recently took down Arab news network Al-Jazeera's website.
Technically the site was hacked. But hackers, who say they abhor breaking into systems for fun or profit -- as opposed to malicious crackers and the amateurs known as script kiddies -- believe shutting off access to information is distinctly un-hackerlike behavior.
Al-Jazeera's website was downed by relentless denial-of-service attacks early last week. Then, on Thursday, site visitors were automatically redirected to a page bearing an American flag logo and the words "Let Freedom Ring."
"The individual(s) who did this are committing a computer crime and causing censorship," said Oxblood Ruffin, executive director of Hacktivismo, a group that develops tools to circumvent censorship. "The former would not be tolerated by American courts; the latter is in part why America went to war in the first place. Either way, it's not good."
"There is no difference between the White House censoring (longtime political reporter) Helen Thomas and packet wankers taking down Al-Jazeera," Ruffin added. "They're all cut from the same cloth. Bullies, cowards, hypocrites."
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Second Major Vulnerability Discovered In Sendmail This Month
CERT warned of a security vulnerability in sendmail that could allow attackers to take over the application and launch a denial-of-service attack.
The vulnerability stems from address parsing code that does not adequately check the length of e-mail addresses. An e-mail message with a specially crafted address could trigger a stack overflow, CERT said in a security advisory issued Saturday.
Most medium to large-sized organizations are likely to have at least one vulnerable sendmail server, CERT said. Also, many Unix and Linux workstations provide a sendmail implementation that is enabled and running by default.
Sendmail servers on the interior of a network are at risk, because Internet-facing mail servers that are not themselves vulnerable to the attack can pass messages on to vulnerable servers on the interior of the network, CERT said. Messages capable of exploiting the vulnerability can pass undetected through many common packet filters or firewalls.
CERT recommends users apply a patch from Sendmail Inc.
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Hacker cracks Xbox challenge
An anonymous hacker has succeeded in running Linux on an unmodified Xbox, apparently satisfying a $100,000 challenge funded by Lindows founder Michael Robertson.
A hacker using the name Habibi-Xbox revealed the exploit Saturday in a message posted on the Xbox Hacker Web site. Organizers of the Xbox-Linux Project confirmed the method works.
The trick involves the "save/load game" function in the James Bond game "007: Agent Under Fire," which normally allows players to save a file recording their progress in the game to the Xbox's hard drive and later reload it. Habibi found that by using one of several USB storage devices recognized by the Xbox, the "load game" screen can also be used to load other software, including compact versions of the Linux operating system.
The technique apparently exploits a "buffer overflow" flaw in the 007 game, a technique similar to that used by online vandals to damage servers. "Basically, there is a bug in the save handling, which has been found in several games," Habibi wrote in the posting.
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Stem Cell Finds Change Everything
The results of two new studies may completely transform the way scientists worldwide approach the field of stem cell research.
Scientists have long believed that stem cells -- derived from blood, bone marrow or embryos -- are capable of repairing damaged tissue by taking on the identity of that organ's cells, a phenomenon known as differentiation.
But the new studies show that in the diseased livers of mice, stem cells didn't differentiate. Instead, they fused with the injured liver cells to perform the necessary repairs.
The finding is controversial, especially among stem cell researchers who have devoted a lot of energy to uncovering a way to induce the cells to change identity.
"I'm a little bit disappointed with this finding," said Holger Willenbring, an author of one of two papers published in the March 30 issue of Nature and a researcher in Markus Grompe's lab at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. "Not extremely, but at first you wanted to believe there was a cell in the adult body which can adopt every phenotype and can repair tissue and be the future of regenerative medicine."
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PayPal charged with breaking Patriot Act
A U.S. Attorney's office has alleged that PayPal violated laws regarding the processing of online gambling payments, and is asking parent company eBay to hand over nine months of the gambling-related earnings in settlement.
The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri told eBay that its online payment service violated provisions in the USA Patriot Act between October 2001 and July 2002, according to eBay's annual report, filed Monday with securities regulators. Under the act, it is prohibited to transmit funds known to have come from a criminal offense, or that are intended to promote or support unlawful activities.
The agency is seeking to collect any earnings that PayPal received from online gambling merchants during the nine-month period, as well as interest. Last year, PayPal received 6 percent of its revenue from online gambling, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
eBay, however, takes issue with the U.S. Attorney's allegations.
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Egyptian archaelogists find oldest evidence of mummification
A discovery over the weekend has revealed a fascinating insight into ancient Egypt.
While some might think it gruesome, archaeologists are very excited to have uncovered the oldest evidence of mummification at the Sakkara pyramids, near Cairo.
Egyptian archaeologists opened a 5,000-year-old wooden coffin in the desert near Cairo to find a pile of bones which they say shows the oldest evidence found so far of human mummification in Egypt.
"The surprise (was) when we opened the wooden coffin, we found inside a skeleton. But the most important thing (is) that we can see the evidence of mummification for the first time is clear on the skeleton because of a resin and it's clear on the skin of the person," said Dr Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities.
The coffin was found in one of more than 20 mud-brick tombs, said to have belonged to officials who had lived under the first ancient Egyptian dynasty.
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Tech firms respond to deadly illness
Sun Microsystems and ATI Technologies are the latest tech companies to see their plans in Asia disrupted by fears of a deadly flulike disease.
Concerns about Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) led computer-maker Sun to cancel the Shanghai portion of a massive product launch it had scheduled for April 7, while chipmaker ATI postponed an Asian tour to show off its new line of products. These decisions come on top of steps taken by tech giants Motorola, Hewlett-Packard and Intel to shut facilities to prevent the spread of SARS.
In ATI's case, CEO K.Y. Ho and other company officials were scheduled to visit Taiwan and other Asian sites to introduce new graphics chips. But the company had already unveiled the products in Europe and North America, and health worries won out, said Paul Ayscough, ATI's head of corporate marketing. "The timing of this tour was not business critical," he said. "We decided to put the safety of the team first."
A Sun representative said that to avoid the illness, the company will put a San Francisco event at the center of its launch, which will involve new servers, software, storage systems and services.
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AMD Follows Intel By Raising Chip Prices
Distributers tell theInquirer that AMD has now followed suit in jacking up prices of its CPU because weak demand in North America and dumping in Taiwan have taken their toll on prices.
While Intel started the astonishing trend at the beginning of last week, we now understand that AMD has followed the lead of Chipzilla, imposing unprecedented price rises rather than price drops on the channel.
AMD told its major distributors late last Friday that the prices of its CPUs would soar by as much as an astonishing $12 per microprocessor, with the price rises taking effect in the Americas first thing Monday.
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Nvidia updates Linux software
Graphics chip leader Nvidia released new software Monday intended to make it easier for Linux users to update their system software.
Nvidia's new Linux Update tools lets PC users running various versions of the open-source Linux operating system update their video drivers--software files that govern how PC hardware interacts with software--with just a few clicks, said Andrew Fear, a Nvidia product manager.
Updating Linux drivers previously required a series of decisions, including correctly identifying the processor configuration and the Linux kernel that the drivers needed to work with.
"It was pretty daunting to figure out the right combination," Fear said. "You had to scroll through a couple of pages on our Web site just to get through the list of things you needed to do."
The new installation software detects relevant details about the system it's running on and automatically installs the correct drivers. The goal is to make it as easy to keep a Linux installation up-to-date as it is a Windows-based PC, Fear said.
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Chip sales chill in February
Global chip sales slowed in February, with a 3.3 percent dip from January's $12.2 billion in revenue.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) on Monday also noted that the first quarter tends to be seasonally flat and said it expects demand to strengthen during the second half of the year, leading to double-digit growth for the year.
Although worldwide semiconductor sales racked up $11.8 billion in February--an 18 percent increase from sales of $10 billion in the same month a year earlier--the association noted that geopolitical uncertainties, exasperated by the U.S.-led war against Iraq, had impinged on demand for chip products.
"The recovery in the semiconductor industry that has been under way for more than 15 months appears to have stalled in February," said SIA president George Scalise. "Demand has softened in the markets that drove growth...including PCs, global wireless and consumer."
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Microsoft Delivers Wi-Fi Update For XP
Trying to enhance the appeal of Windows XP among wireless users, Microsoft on Monday announced it is making a free upgrade available that supports the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) with a new security solutions from the Wi-Fi Alliance.
The new software is meant to be a replacement for the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) standard that reportedly has more robust methods of data encryption and network authentication, which gives Windows XP users a better guarantee of security, according to Microsoft officials.
"While most of the feedback has been good on Windows XP and how easy it is to use for Wi-Fi, some also say the security is not quite what it needs to be. Many IT managers are hesitant to enable wireless connectivity in their organizations," said Jawad Khaki, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the company's networking and communications technologies for Windows platforms.
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SCO warns of IBM lawsuit risks
SCO Group warned in a regulatory filing that its billion-dollar lawsuit alleging that IBM misappropriated trade secrets will be costly and could alienate others in the computing industry.
"Unintended consequences of our lawsuit against IBM may adversely affect our business," the Lindon, Utah-based seller of Unix and Linux products warned last week in a regulatory filing that permits two major shareholders to sell all their stock. The shareholders received the stock in 2002 in connection with SCO's efforts to get financial help, including the possibility of finding a buyer.
SCO sued IBM earlier in March, alleging IBM misappropriated trade secrets by taking SCO intellectual property in the Unix operating system and moving it into Linux. The suit also alleges unfair competition, breach of contract and tortuous interference with SCO's business. The company is seeking more than $1 billion in the case, has hired high-profile attorney David Boies to pursue the claim and is threatening to revoke IBM's license to ship its version of Unix, called AIX.
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Shuttle launches ultra small Nforce 2 motherboard
MicroATX usually means a small machine with not too much grunt, especially when you talk about integrated graphics solutions. Shuttle has decided that it's time to rethink that idea. It has launched an Nforce 2 based µATX motherboard that should be a real cracker.
Shuttle is more usually associated with small form factor barebones systems but the company is obviously keen to show it's happy for others to make the cases. The new MN31N motherboard has nearly all of the features you would expect to find on a decent full size motherboard: AGP slot, 10/100 Ethernet, 6 USB 2 ports, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and optional Firewire. It even manages 3 PCI slots. And the graphics side of things is pretty good too with dual monitor outputs.
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Lawmakers aim to nix tax on Net access
Several lawmakers are looking to make a ban on Internet access taxes permanent, in hopes of sidestepping the more controversial question of whether Internet sales should be taxed.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., said Monday they would try to make the existing ban permanent before it expires in November. In addition, Republican Rep. Chris Cannon said his committee would start work on the bill this week.
"I think it's important to move this immediately," said Cannon, who chairs the House of Representatives subcommittee on commercial and administrative law.
The moratorium, first passed in 1998, prohibits "multiple and discriminatory" taxes on Internet traffic. That means states, counties or other jurisdictions may not tax Internet access fees or Internet traffic.
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Freedom to e-mail takes the stand
Anti-Intel crusader Ken Hamidi's long-standing battle to highlight alleged unfair labor practices at the chip giant is set to get another day in court this week.
At a hearing Wednesday, Intel is expected to ask the California Supreme Court to uphold an earlier legal ruling that found Hamidi had trespassed on its servers by sending thousands of unwanted e-mails to staff at work. Hamidi, an ex-Intel employee, will ask that the decision be overturned, arguing that he was merely expressing his First Amendment rights.
The case goes beyond one man's colorful attempts to discredit a scion of high technology. Free speech groups as well as business and labor interests are closely watching the suit, which could set broad rules governing how people are allowed to communicate over private e-mail systems.
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Encryption backers brace for new threats
Cheating on income taxes or neglecting to pay sales taxes on online shopping could get you five extra years in prison if the government succeeds in restricting data-scrambling technology, encryption-rights advocates fear.
Such a measure, they worry, might also discourage human rights workers in, say, Sri Lanka from encrypting the names and addresses of their confidants, in case they fall into the wrong hands.
Draft legislation circulating in the Justice Department would extend prison sentences for scrambling data in the commission of a crime, something encryption advocates fear would achieve little in catching terrorists -- and only hurt legitimate uses of cryptography.
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Do you trust Microsoft?
Three-fourths of computer software security experts at major companies surveyed by Forrester Research do not think Microsoft's products are secure, the technology research company said Monday.
While 77 percent of respondents in the information technology field said security was a top concern when using Windows, 89 percent still use the software for sensitive applications, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester said in a report titled "Can Microsoft Be Secure?"
The survey polled 35 software security experts at companies with at least $1 billion in revenue.
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Shuttle data offers vital clues
Data obtained from a salvaged Columbia data recorder shows trouble started more than a minute earlier than previously thought.
Hot gas had entered the leading edge of the left wing within 16 seconds of the time that Columbia experienced maximum aerodynamic heating.
Looking at the new information, one accident investigator said that it indicated Columbia began its descent with the mechanism of failure already in place.
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