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April 2, 2003
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Many web sites still open to IIS 5.0 exploit
Three-quarters of web sites running Microsoft's Internet Information Server 5.0 software to serve web pages have the WebDAV protocol enabled and thus remain open to a serious vulnerability which was announced by Microsoft last month, the latest web server survey from Netcraft says.
Microsoft issued a security alert on March 17 regarding a buffer overflow vulnerability which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on Windows 2000 machines.
The vulnerability is triggered by the Microsoft-IIS/5.0 implementation of the World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol and is specific to Microsoft-IIS/5.0. WebDAV was not supported in Microsoft-IIS/4.0, and Microsoft-IIS/6.0 is reported to be unaffected.
The survey found 767,721 IPs running IIS 5.0 and offering WebDAV and 273,496 IPs running IIS 5.0 with the protocol turned off.
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New MSN leaks onto Internet
A preview of an upcoming version of Microsoft's MSN service has leaked onto the Web, offering an early glimpse of the software giant's ever-evolving online strategy.
The new software, dubbed MSN 8.5, comes five months after launching MSN 8, which it considered the most significant update of its Internet service since its inception.
A Microsoft spokesman would not confirm that the download is authentic, but a version downloaded by CNET News.com included branding and copyright information consistent with Microsoft's products.
The spokesman said the name MSN 8.5 was not officially established and was liable to change, despite using MSN 8.5 in the preview version. He also confirmed Microsoft sent out notices soliciting beta testers for the service.
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Dell promotes Linux clusters ... again
Dell continues to forge stronger ties with Oracle with the introduction of some pre-packaged clusters pitched as replacements to multiprocessor Unix systems.
Dell and Oracle have been making joint cluster announcements together for some time now, so the push to ship bundles of Dell servers and storage systems with Oracle software should come as no surprise. The clusters will start at $18,000 and will run on Oracle9i RAC(Real Application Clusters) for either Red Hat Linux Advanced Server or Microsoft Windows.
The deal was important enough to warrant the presence of Michael Dell and Larry Ellison at an event in New York.
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Office for schools tempts consumers
Microsoft is about to make it easier for just about anyone to buy its low-cost Office suite designed for students and teachers.
The company will modify the licensing terms for its teacher and student productivity suite when Office 2003 ships this summer. This is an apparent attempt to lower the cost of Office for consumers without actually repricing it and thus could spur greater adoption in the consumer market, say analysts.
The licensing changes extend an existing strategy adopted with the 2001 release of Office XP Standard for Teachers and Students. In October of that year, Microsoft dropped the price of the product to $149, but some retailers offered the suite for as low as $110--or about $330 less than the otherwise identical version for people who are not students or teachers.
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Australia switches on £470m spy radar
Australia's defence minister, Robert Hill, launched a £470m radar system yesterday which will allow surveillance of neighbouring countries.
The Jindalee operational radar network (Jorn) was completed five years behind schedule and £50m over budget.
It is intended to spot large boats or aircraft but Senator Hill also linked it to concerns about regional terrorism in the wake of the Bali bombing. He said: "This is a much more valuable asset than I think the public will ever understand.
"It's a huge capability boost in terms of surveillance and as we focus on such issues as regional terrorism, it's going to be a great asset."
Previous Australian governments have been worried by their inability to carry out consistent surveillance of the country's vast north. A prototype of Jorn has been used to pick out people-smuggling boats in the Timor sea.
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Phoenix rises from Mozilla's ashes
Three months after Apple Computer bypassed it for a smaller, faster Web browser, Mozilla.org has refocused its coding efforts on a smaller, faster version of its own product.
In a new roadmap released Wednesday, AOL Time Warner's open-source browser development group Mozilla.org said its next build would be based on its Phoenix version, which it introduced in September 2002.
Under the new plan, Mozilla will abandon its XPFE toolkit for creating the browser's user interface. Instead, the main Mozilla code will come from the Phoenix project, a stripped down version of Mozilla written with Extensible User Interface Language (XUL). XUL, introduced four years ago by Netscape and Mozilla engineers, renders the browser with standard Web technologies, rather than platform-specific computer coding languages.
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Tech Firms Collaborate on Big Bang Experiment
In a project that includes next-generation gear from Hewlett-Packard, Intel and IBM, researchers at the CERN laboratory are constructing a computer network that will help them test the "Big Bang" theory. Located in Switzerland, CERN is renowned as the birthplace of the World Wide Web.
At the center of the project is a highly powerful particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider, which is expected to be built by 2005. Scientists will attempt to use the Collider to create the type of particles that would have existed shortly after the Big Bang created the universe. Conversely, the experiment may prove that such particles do not exist, which would work to disprove the theory.
"We're trying to create similar conditions as happened at that time."
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Mozilla 1.4a (Alpha) Released
Mozilla 1.4 Alpha is out. This release features dynamic image and table resizing in Composer, smooth scrolling (see release notes for enabling this feature,) and improvements to spam filtering. In addition to these feature improvements, 1.4a also contains fixes for perfomance, stability, standards support and website compatibility. This is an alpha release so expect bugs, and don't use it unless you are willing to live with the risks inherent in such a release (ie. crashes, data loss, etc.). More information is available in the release notes.
Mozilla.org
Mozilla 1.4a Download:
Windows (95,98,ME,NT,2000,XP)
Mac OS X
Linux x86
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Office 2003 to Come in Six Variants
Microsoft Corp. unveiled on Wednesday its planned six-SKU lineup for Office 2003.
The six editions on tap are Professional Enterprise, Professional, Standard, Students and Teachers, Small Business, and Basic.
With Office XP, Microsoft offered four SKUs: Professional, Standard, Students and Teachers, and Developer. Microsoft decided to drop the Developer Edition and instead target developers with a set of tools known as Visual Studio Tools for Office, due out this summer.
Microsoft has decided not to include its new OneNote application with any of the Office suite bundles it will ship later this year, sources told eWEEK on Tuesday. OneNote is a note-taking software application that allows users to capture, store and retrieve typewritten notes, pictures and diagrams on their laptop, desktop and Tablet PCs.
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Super squid surfaces in Antarctic
A colossal squid has been caught in Antarctic waters, the first example of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni retrieved virtually intact from the surface of the ocean.
It really has to be one of the most frightening predators out there
"All we knew prior to this specimen coming through was that this animal lived in the abyssal environment down in Antarctica," New Zealand squid expert and senior research fellow at Auckland University of Technology, Dr Steve O'Shea, told BBC News Online.
"Now we know that it is moving right though the water column, right up to the very surface and it grows to a spectacular size."
Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni was first identified in 1925 after two arms were recovered from a sperm whale's stomach.
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Al-Jazeera most sought-after in Internet searches
In spite of being mostly knocked offline, the Web site of Arab satellite news network Al-Jazeera was among the most sought-after on the Internet last week.
The Web portal Lycos reported that "Al-Jazeera" and variant spellings became its top search term last week, with three times more searches than "sex."
Al-Jazeera drew intense interest from Web surfers after it carried Iraqi TV footage of dead and captive U.S. soldiers in Iraq. U.S. television networks had decided not to air footage of the corpses. Al-Jazeera later honored a U.S. request to stop until families could be notified, a statement from the network said.
The Internet's leading search engine, Google, said "Al-Jazeera" was the term that showed the greatest increase in the week ending March 31. Google does not report absolute rankings of search terms.
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Holes found in RealPlayer, QuickTime
Just as streaming video and audio are hitting the mainstream, researchers have sounded the alarm about serious security holes in two popular digital media players.
The vulnerabilities have cropped up in RealNetworks' RealPlayer and Apple Computer's QuickTime. While unrelated, the weak spots could allow an intruder to execute damaging arbitrary code on a victim's computer. In both cases, an update or workaround is available to remedy the problem.
Security experts are increasingly concerned about hackers exploiting digital media players, which are designed to accept Web addresses and scripts--a key route for self-propagating, hostile code.
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Microsoft calls AMD X86-64 operating system Anvil
We saw versions of Microsoft's X86-64 operating system running on AMD chips at CeBIT in March, despite naysayers who wouldn't have it that such a creature existed.
But now we have absolute confirmation that there is an X86-64 version of Windows for the Hammer platform and rather suitably Microsoft has codenamed it Anvil.
Sources tell us that Clyde Rodriguez,a lead program manager, Windows, Forrest Foltz, a Windows architect, and Dave Cutler, who has the impressive monikor of a senior distinguished engineer at Microsoft, are set to talk about Anvil on April 8th at a specialist conference on the Vole's campus.
The source added that Microsoft is describing Anvil as bringing 64-bit computing to the masses, a phrase that will make Intel cross when it reads this article.
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Cloning Apple: The iBox
A Minnesota man has plans to launch his own Macintosh-manufacturing business, building a low-cost, upgradeable Mac called the iBox.
John Fraser, a 21-year-old engineer from Chanhassen, Minnesota, is finalizing the design for his flat "pizzabox" Mac and hopes to go into production in three to four months. If successful, Fraser will be the first third party to make a Mac since Apple shut down its three-year experiment in clone licensing in 1997.
Unlike the world of Windows PCs, which has many hardware makers, Apple is the only company making Macs. Apple doesn't license its operating system to outside hardware manufacturers.
Fraser hopes to sidestep the licensing issues by using older, off-the-shelf parts made by Apple and sold to computer repair outfits as spare parts. He will use Apple-made motherboards preloaded with Macintosh ROMs -- the vital piece of hardware-cum-software that makes a Mac a Mac. Customers will supply their own Mac operating system.
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Gov't Isn't Watching You.. They're Paying Someone Else to do It
The U.S. government has discovered a powerful resource in its war against terrorism - credit-card records, hotel bills, grocery lists and other records detailing the private lives of its citizens. Government investigators are turning to commercial databases to track down and isolate possible hijackers and suicide bombers before they strike, raising fear among privacy advocates that long-standing protections against government snooping may be eroded.
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AMD revs up transistor designs
Advanced Micro Devices has brewed two new advanced transistor designs that it says will lead to higher chip performance.
The chipmaker's researchers have created and demonstrated a new Fully Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator transistor, the company said Wednesday. The silicon-on-insulator design technique uses special materials to better isolate transistors inside a chip, with the aim of increasing performance and reducing power consumption.
AMD's twist on the transistor design is as much as 30 percent faster than some of the best published results seen so far, the company said.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has also demonstrated a new strained silicon transistor based on a metal-gate design. That technology has shown 20 percent to 25 percent better performance than conventional strained-silicon transistors, AMD said.
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Warning on web travel deals
Many cheap travel deals advertised on the net are not all they seem, according to trading standards authorities.
More than 50 UK travel websites - half of all the sites that were checked - were found to be making potentially misleading claims.
Many UK sites were also failing to conform with a raft of consumer protection regulations, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the UK's trading watchdog, said.
Last year a similar swoop across internet sites exposed the extent of bogus health claims made on the web.
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ATI ships new graphics cards
Graphics chip maker ATI Technologies announced Wednesday that it has begun shipping high-end graphics cards based on its new Radeon 9800 processor, ATI's latest bid to retain the speed lead in the turbulent graphics industry. ATI has tried to capitalize on numerous delays rival Nvidia has faced in bringing its GeForce FX chip to market.
"Once again we promised, and we delivered," Rick Bergman, senior vice president of marketing for ATI, said in a statement. "Consumers and all of our channel partners are about to get their hands on the fastest, best image quality graphics cards available." Nvidia will try to counter ATI by offering mainstream and budget versions of the GeForce FX around the same time the high-end version goes on sale this month.
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Dinosaur Cannibal: Fossil Evidence Found in Africa
"Eat or be eaten" may have been the mantra for Majungatholus atopus, a large, two-footed carnivorous dinosaur with a bump on its head that roamed Madagascar, the island off the southeast coast of Africa, about 65 million years ago.
Analysis of bones scored by tooth marks suggests Majungatholus was a cannibal that regularly dined on members of its own species and other dinosaurs. The rare, tooth-marked bones are the best evidence to date for a behavior probably common among dinosaurs but difficult to prove.
"I don't think this should be unexpected, but because of the nature of the fossil record we get such a limited window on this type of phenomenon. We have such a small sample of what really went down," said Raymond Rogers, a geologist at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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Symantec Defends BugTraq Policies
Symantec Corp. officials are defending their practices for handling postings to the BugTraq mailing list in the face of criticism from an upstart competitor. The way the list is run and when messages are posted hasn't changed at all since Symantec acquired BugTraq's owner, SecurityFocus, last summer, executives say.
"What I can tell you is that we never delay posting any message to BugTraq. And everyone gets access to the messages at the same time," said Art Wong, vice president of security response at Symantec, based in Cupertino, Calif., and the former CEO of SecurityFocus.
Wong's comments contradict charges made by executives at Secunia Ltd., a Danish security company that has started a new mailing list meant to replace BugTraq. The list will aggregate vulnerability advisories from several sources. Officials at the company said last week that they're starting the list because of what they perceive as changes in BugTraq in recent months.
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Radar clues to shuttle accident
Accident investigators say the radar signature of an object seen floating away from Columbia in space is consistent with it being a piece of the left wing.
It was a breach in that region of the wing that allowed superheated gases to leak into the shuttle's airframe, ultimately causing the orbiter's destruction.
The carrier panels connect the edges of the U-shaped reinforced carbon panels that make up the wing's leading edge and heat-resistant tiles stuck to the wing's lower surface.
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Coot Birds Can Count, Study Says
To most people, coots are noisy, quarrelsome water birds that do a lot of splashing about. But it turns out they are also closet cuckoos. Not only that, they can count.
The discovery was made by Bruce Lyon, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His study of an American coot colony in British Columbia, Canada, is the first to show that birds can keep a reckoning of the eggs they lay. It also highlights an extremely rare example of counting by a wild animal.
Supported in part by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, the research is published this week in the science journal Nature.
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NASA Names Next Crew for Space Station
The U.S. space agency NASA has named the next crew of the international space station. Their trip was delayed because of the space shuttle Columbia disaster.
NASA has chosen an American and a Russian who once visited the station together to return as the outpost's new crew. Astronaut Edward Lu and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko went on a construction spacewalk outside the station three years ago. They are to fly back up to it aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on April 26, only the second station crew to do so.
They were to arrive aboard a shuttle with another Russian cosmonaut in March. But the disintegration of Columbia in February caused NASA to halt shuttle flights while investigators determine the cause of the disaster.
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Travel warning over deadly bug
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has advised tourists and business people not to travel to Hong Kong or parts of China because of the outbreak of a deadly, pneumonia-like virus.
The WHO said anyone intending to visit Hong Kong or Guangdong province "should consider postponing their travel until another time".
The view has been echoed by Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, England's chief medical officer, who said people travelling to these areas would be at "significant risk".
The warning came after China said nine more people died from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) in Guangdong last month, bringing the worldwide death toll to 76.
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Software group: Antipiracy helps economies
The Business Software Alliance is hoping to convince international governments, trade associations and companies that cracking down on piracy pays.
The group, an antipiracy organization with members including Microsoft, Adobe Systems, and Cisco Systems, is planning to release a study Wednesday suggesting that increasing copy protections could generate jobs and tax revenue.
The study, commissioned by the BSA and conducted by IDC, found that in general, nations with the lowest piracy rates had the largest IT sectors, as measured as a share of the countries' gross domestic product(GDP). Conversely, countries with high piracy rates, such as China and Russia, had the smallest IT sectors.
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State attacking Internet sales of smokes to kids
It isn't hard for kids to find weapons of mass destruction. They just have to click their way to Dirt Cheap Cigarettes, one of a number of online tobacco merchants that state officials say make it all too easy for minors to score smokes.
That's why, after months of quiet investigation, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer will file suit today against five out-of-state Internet tobacco vendors, who are charged with not just peddling nicotine to children but also dodging state cigarette taxes.
The lawsuit -- I'm looking at a copy right now -- says Lockyer's office has been cooperating with authorities in as many as 39 other states to crack down on online cigarette sales. Many of those states are expected to file similar actions in the weeks ahead.
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Profiting From Free Software?
You hear it all the time: "You can't make money off free software." Actually, companies are making quite a bit of money from free software. IBM and HP, for example, have reaped billions of dollars in revenue from Linux. True, they are doing so by bundling open source software with servers and support, but Linux is the glue that binds the entire package together.
But what about pure-play Linux companies? Finding the right revenue model has been a challenge for Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT - news) and SuSE, arguably the biggest players in the Linux market.
Some people compare open source and free software to oxygen and water. These resources are all around us, and most of us are used to getting them for free. But there are still opportunities for people to make money by selling oxygen or water: Purify it, bottle it and deliver it, and it becomes a cash cow.
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Mac OS X 'Panther' on Track for September
Now that Apple Computer Inc. has let the cat halfway out of the bag about the next major revision to Mac OS X, sources report that the "Panther" release will reach end users in mid-September.
According to sources familiar with the forthcoming revisions to the Unix-based OS, Apple will freeze development on new features in May and finalize enhancements to the user interface in July.
While it hasn't publicized the delivery dates, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has begun beating the drum for Panther, the first major release of Mac OS X since "Jaguar" (a k a Mac OS X 10.2) shipped in August 2002. Apple in March announced that it has moved back the 2003 edition of its Worldwide Developers Conference from May to June to prepare a preview release of Panther.
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Shuttle investigation turns to role of paint primer
Paint primer from shuttle launch towers may have splashed with rain onto Columbia and formed pinholes in the leading edge of the left wing that contributed to the disaster, the investigation board says.
Such corrosion over the years could have weakened the carbon panels along the edge enough to break when struck by a chunk of foam during liftoff, the accident investigators said Tuesday.
"We're studying the effects of aging," said the board's chairman, Harold Gehman Jr., a retired Navy admiral.
Air Force Maj. Gen. John Barry said pinholes in the quarter-inch-thick protective carbon lining the edge may have allowed air pockets to form. The air could have gnawed away at the carbon, a process called oxidation.
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