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March 26, 2003
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Microsoft quits W3C standardisation panel
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the body that sets web standards. It is, for instance, responsible for looking after the HTML standard amongst other things. Those other things include a newly formed panel to look at standardising the underpinnings of web services.
According to InfoWorld, Microsoft has been acting very strangely about the whole thing. The idea is to allow complete web services to be built using components from different vendors. If there is a common 'choreography' as the W3C calls it, that should make life much easier. Enter Microsoft. It has already been working on this type of thing with IBM and BEA. The three companies have created something called Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS).
When two Microsoft representatives turned up at the first meeting of the panel, you might be forgiven for thinking that maybe the company was considering working with the W3C to make sure that BPEL4WS worked with the future standard. Especially as BEA is already taking part. But the Microsoft reps took a look at what was going on and promptly quit the panel.
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Black Holes Blow Matter into Space with Tremendous Wind, Study Finds
Astronomers know that black holes spit energy back into space as they voraciously consume matter in a process that is not entirely efficient. Now it seems they propel matter outward, too, in a wind to end all winds.
Theory had predicted the fast-moving exodus of stuff, but no one had ever seen it happening. A new study found evidence of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and iron rushing out from the vicinities of two separate black holes in winds of material moving at some 40 percent the speed of light, faster than astronomers expected.
The black holes are supermassive, weighing as much as millions or billions of regular stars and anchoring two distant, bright and fledgling galaxies called quasars. Quasars are thought to be surrounded by vast reservoirs of gas, which tends to move toward the center and fuel star birth while also feeding the black hole. The chaos leads to intensely bright objects which, astronomers believe, settle down and become conventional galaxies over time.
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NEC to build China LCD plant
In another indication of the intense competition among Asia's flat-panel display makers, NEC on Wednesday announced a tie-up with SVA, the Chinese electronics group, to build a liquid crystal display (LCD) production facility in Shanghai at a cost of ¥85bn ($700m).
NEC will contribute 25 per cent of the joint venture's capital with the remainder to be contributed by SVA.
The new facility, which will have a fifth-generation production line, is expected to come on stream in October 2004. It will employ an initial 1,200 workers and produce large TFT LCD screens predominantly for the Chinese market.
Samsung Electronics of South Korea said on Tuesday it would spend nearly $1bn on a plant that would also produce large-sized LCDs.
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SuSE announces Itanium availability of server OS
SuSE Linux AG on Wednesday announced the general availability of its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 operating system for Intel Corp.'s family of 64-bit Itanium processors.
The Itanium version of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 software comes with four CDs, documentation and 12 months of maintenance, and it will be available by the end of the month, the company said in a statement Wednesday.
SuSE also announced that this Itanium version of the operating system has been chosen for the TeraGrid, a project launched by the National Science Foundation in August 2001 to build a massive, distributed computer network for scientific research.
When completed, the TeraGrid will include 20 teraflops of computing power distributed at five sites, the capacity of managing and storing almost 1 petabyte of data and toolkits for grid computing, according to the project's Web site (www.teragrid.org). Its components will be connected through a network operating at 40 gigabits per second, according to that Web site.
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Hubble 'CAT-scans' an erupting star
A nondescript distant star that suddenly erupted in a brief but blinding flash has revealed surprising clues about its uncommon nature, astronomers reported Wednesday.
Using a series of spectacular images from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as an observational technique that parallels the medical procedure known as a CAT-scan, astronomers also hope to probe more closely a peculiar celestial event called a nova.
The star, named V838 Monocerotis for its location in the constellation of the same name, suddenly grew 600,000 times brighter than the sun in January 2002. The flash temporarily made the star -- in the constellation also known as The Unicorn -- the brightest light in the Milky Way.
Though not the result of a supernova -- a titanic explosion that blasts a giant star into oblivion -- V838 Mon's eruption nevertheless was powerful enough to light up a considerable chunk of its neighborhood.
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What Is Amazon.com Hiding?
They say that in war, the first casualty is the truth. For online booksellers, however, the truth seems to be MIA.
In late 2001, the U.S. Congress passed the PATRIOT Act, designed as a first step in a new, sudden war on terrorism.
For those of you who haven't read the Act itself, the document is a fragmented mess of addenda, revisions, and additions to the U.S. Civil Code. Actually, most of the document concerns itself with money laundering; the Act argues that the easiest way to assist terrorism is to provide terrorists with money. Finally, the Act redefines terrorist activities, including hackers in the mix.
But the Act also includes some seemingly non-sensical provisions regarding the use of evidence in seeking out terrorists, including what books individuals purchase.
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Capellas: IP Backbone Is WorldCom's Future
The future of beleaguered WorldCom Inc. rests on its IP backbone, said Michael Capellas, CEO and chairman of WorldCom Inc., here Wednesday.
Ten weeks after taking the helm at the bankrupt telecommunications giant, Capellas said his strategy centers on using the IP backbone to offer network-centric services built using Web services and open standards. Capellas, formerly Compaq Computer Corp.'s CEO and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s president, was speaking to hundreds of IT managers here at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo.
"As I look at the next great wave of what's going to happen—the evolution of commoditization of the data center, and the emergence of Web services—we're all trying to figure out how to move to this utility model," Capellas said. "This takes a really open set of standards around an IP backbone, and the one capability I know we have is the world's best IP backbone."
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Swedish Worm Writer Nabbed
Swedish police said Tuesday they detained the creator of a computer virus that had tried to trick recipients into opening and spreading it by offering war-related messages.
Police said the virus, dubbed Ganda, clogged thousands of computers worldwide last week, reproducing itself by sending out e-mail messages offering screensavers with names like "Spy pics" and "Go USA."
A message hidden in the virus helped Swedish investigators trace the suspect to Haernoesand, 250 miles north of the capital, Stockholm, police spokesman Torbjoern Ull said.
He said the man confessed to creating and spreading the virus after police raided his home Friday. He was not arrested, but prosecutor Kristina Brolin said she would file charges of computer trespassing and inflicting damage.
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MacHack Will Go On
Despite a looming conflict with Apple Computer Inc.'s revamped conference schedule, the management company behind MacHack on Tuesday announced that the storied gathering of Macintosh programmers would go on.
Expotech of Grosse Point Park, Mich., announced that the 18th annual MacHack will run as originally scheduled, from June 19 to 21 in Dearborn, Mich., despite the fact that Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is now due to kick off two days later.
Apple last week announced that it was rescheduling WWDC from May to June. WWDC is now slated to run June 23 to 27 in San Francisco instead of in its traditional home in San Jose, Calif. Apple said it needed the extra five weeks to prepare a preview release of its next major Mac OS X upgrade, dubbed "Panther."
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Al-Jazeera hobbled by DDOS attack
The Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera suffered a second day of sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against its English- and Arabic-language Web sites today.
The attacks have pushed the network, which is based in Doha, Qatar, off the Web for the time being and have forced Al-Jazeera to increase bandwidth for the sites and step up security in a desperate effort to get back online.
"All of our Web sites are down. The U.S. [Web site] is out of order, and the Europe [Web site] is under attack. We come up for five or 10 minutes, and then the attacks bring us down again," said Salah AlSeddiqi, IT manager at Al-Jazeera.
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Scam casts doubt on eBay's anti-fraud software
Robert Beck suspended his distrust of online auctions and went for a top-of-the-line speaker system. He cast a winning bid of $1,900, paid by credit card and waited for his first eBay purchase.
The speakers never arrived.
Last week, detectives confirmed to the 25-year-old engineer that the sellers, an Arizona couple, had cashed out their bank account and fled. The couple allegedly stole more than $100,000 from more than 500 bidders.
The case has cast suspicion on eBay Inc.'s anti-fraud software, which the San Jose-based company installed nearly a year ago to counter complaints about fly-by-night sellers.
Beck and other victims say the software -- which ostensibly gets better the longer it's in use -- should have alerted eBay to cancel the auction long before hundreds of people parted with their money.
"The red flags in this case were all over the place," said Beck, a St. Louis resident. "For eBay to say that the software works -- the principle of it makes me sick."
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Soldier 'bloggers' report from war
There's a new breed of combat personnel at the war front: soldier "bloggers."
Once the narrow domain of geeks and technology journalists, "Web logs" -- or diary accounts published online -- have gone mainstream, making it possible for even soldiers to transmit daily updates to Web sites about the rigours of battle.
War-themed blogs, appearing on sites such as www.blogsofwar.com and www.sgtstryker.com, have become a popular alternative news source since fighting broke out in Iraq a week ago, sometimes beating newspapers and television with war developments.
One of the most popular is a site run by "L.T. Smash," the blog nickname for a reservist in the U.S. Navy who arrived in the Gulf last December. His site, www.lt-smash.us, carries the moniker "Live from the sandbox."
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New clues in Columbia probe
The way metal melted in debris from the space shuttle Columbia indicates the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing experienced the hottest temperatures, perhaps offering clues as to where fiery gases penetrated the spacecraft, experts said Wednesday.
"This part of the leading edge saw the hottest heat," Mark Tanner, a mechanical engineer told members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board during a second day of hearings. "I think this tells us a small story."
Molten metal is much more apparent on panels from the left wing than the right wing, said Gregory Kovacs, a professor of electronics at Stanford University, who is studying the debris for investigators.
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Flash escapes the browser
Macromedia hopes to make its Flash animation player a "first-class citizen" on PCs with a new addition that allows the software to operate outside of a Web browser.
The company is scheduled to announce the planned Flash enhancement and associated services, dubbed Macromedia Central, Thursday morning at its FlashForward developer conference in San Francisco. Tools for developers will be available next month, but consumers won't be able to download the Central software until this summer.
Macromedia last year began a wide-reaching campaign to expand the role of Flash in Web design, promoting the software as a broad platform for designing Web applications and building user interfaces. Macromedia has made noticeable inroads with the push, with many sites rebuilt around Flash, but the Flash experience still has to happen inside a browser window.
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Xerox: Making Fiber A Possibility
Xerox says it has developed a chip that will greatly diminish the cost of connecting homes and offices to fiber cables in the ground.
Researchers at Xerox's Wilson Center for Research and Technology announced Wednesday that they have created a silicon chip about the size of a fingertip that contains switches and waveguides for fiber-optic communication.
Ideally, network equipment manufacturers will be able to build relatively inexpensive boxes with the chip that can effectively split up the channels delivered by a standard fiber-optic line and deliver bandwidth to a large number of individuals.
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Watchdogs: Cable gouges broadband users
U.S. consumer groups on Wednesday charged that cable companies were gouging customers who subscribe only to high-speed Internet service but not to cable television, and asked antitrust enforcers to investigate.
The nation's biggest cable provider, Comcast, recently acquired AT&T's cable assets. It then raised prices for those customers who sign up only for high-speed Internet service to $56.95 (Comcast's monthly going rate), a rise of 33 percent on the previous $42.95 charge.
Customers will receive the $42.95 price for Internet service if they also sign up for cable television service, Comcast spokeswoman Sarah Eder said. Basic cable service runs about $12, but services with the most channels cost much more.
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DOJ looks into Network Associates books
The U.S. Department of Justice will join an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Network Associates' accounting.
The security software company announced the Justice Department's involvement on Wednesday and added that it plans to delay filing its annual report, known in financial terminology as a "10-K," so it can restate earning for fiscal years 1998, 1999 and 2000 to take into account information from the investigation.
"We don't know when (the Justice Department) became involved," said Jennifer Keavney, a spokeswoman for Network Associates. "We became aware of their investigation this quarter, so we are disclosing that as required. But how long they have been involved, we don't know."
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Electronics companies form LCD alliance
NEC and SVA see liquid crystal displays in China's future.
The two electronics companies on Wednesday said they have signed an agreement to create a Shanghai-based joint venture by June 2003. SVA, the largest electronics group in China, is a holding company with interests in product development, manufacturing and sales of household appliances and LCD displays.
The forthcoming company, which is thus far unnamed, will plan, develop and manufacture thin filament transistor LCD panels and modules for PCs, monitors and displays primarily for the Chinese market. NEC and SVA invested 50 billion yen, or just over $416 million, in the company, with 75 percent coming from SVA and 25 percent from NEC.
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Fighting spam for a good cause
Two IBM researchers are proposing a new method of fighting spam that would force unfamiliar senders to donate to charity if they want to reach you.
Under the proposal, concocted by IBM researchers Scott Fahlman and Mark Wegman, e-mail senders who haven't been cleared by a recipient would receive a message that their mail did not go through. They would then be instructed that they could reach the intended recipient if they were to pay a third-party site a few cents for a "charity stamp." The money paid to the third-party site, which could range from a penny to a quarter, would be donated to a charity of the sender's choice.
E-mail bearing the charity stamp could then reach the recipient.
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Bush order covers Internet secrets
President Bush has signed an executive order that explicitly gives the government the power to classify information about critical infrastructures such as the Internet.
Bush late Tuesday changed the definition of what the government may classify as confidential, secret and top-secret to include details about "infrastructures" and weapons of mass destruction. The new executive order also makes clear that information related to "defense against transnational terrorism" is classifiable.
In his executive order, which replaces a 1995 directive signed by President Bill Clinton, Bush said that information that already had been declassified and released to the public could be reclassified by a federal agency. Clinton's order said that "information may not be reclassified after it has been declassified and released to the public."
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Use misleading domain name, go to jail?
The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote Thursday on a proposal that would criminalize using misleading domain names to lure unsuspecting people to sex sites.
Under the proposal, a last-minute amendment to an unrelated child abduction bill, people who knowingly use an innocent-sounding domain name to drive traffic to a sexually explicit Web site could be fined and imprisoned for two to four years. An example of an innocuous-sounding domain name with pornographic content is WhiteHouse.com, which is not sponsored by the Bush administration.
A second amendment that is scheduled for a floor vote at the same time renews Congress' campaign to outlaw "morphed" or virtual child pornography. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court slapped down Congress' first attempt to ban nude images of computer-generated minors and underage teens, saying the 1996 law violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression.
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Al-Jazeera English web site goes live
Update The Wall Street Journal claimed that the Al-Jazeera site was downed today because of a massive denial of service attack. The site is based in Qatar but has servers in France and the US. The newspaper claimed only the US servers were under attack. 20:21 UT. INQUIRER readers reported that the site uses Microsoft server software and they began to get error messages around 15:20 UT. At the time of writing, however, the site was accessible.
News organisation Al-Jazeera put the English language version of its web site online yesterday and looked sure to attract page views a plenty.
The site, which describes itself as providing objective and balanced global news coverage and analysis, currently leads with a story about Iraq being hit by a fresh wave of attacks on various cities.
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Commuters hack wireless networks
Wireless hacking is most likely to occur during the rush hour, a survey has found.
Jumping on to the increasing number of wireless networks around cities such as London has become something of a hobby for hackers and those seeking to gain free access to the internet.
The security arm of consultancy firm KPMG set out to discover just how big a menace so-called war driving is to London businesses.
It set up three wireless "honeypots" around the City of London in an attempt to lure hackers.
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