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April 28, 2003
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Hackers have fun with Madonna decoy
Anyone who thinks they can control the Internet received an object lesson during the past week.
It all started when Madonna literally lent her voice to a popular antipiracy technique. Warner Music Group had audio files purporting to be her new songs uploaded onto peer-to-peer file-sharing services. Anyone who downloaded the decoys, however, heard nothing but the pop star swearing at them. But since then, the pithy profanity has taken on a life of its own.
Some observers thought Madonna was smart to fight piracy with its own tools. Others perceived a thrown gauntlet -- hackers soon defaced Madonna's Web site with an equally profane retort along with several downloadable files of the then-unreleased songs. The defacement also carried a marriage proposal to Morgan Webb, an associate producer and on-air presenter at TechTV who had nothing to do with the prank.
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Lessig bets his job on antispam bounty
A U.S. congresswoman plans to introduce an antispam bill that would pay a bounty to some who report spammers, and Stanford University law professor and cyberlaw author Lawrence Lessig said he's so sure the bill will cut the amount of spam sent that he'll quit his job if it doesn't.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from San Jose, California, announced her plans to introduce the Restrict and Eliminate Delivery of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (REDUCE) Spam Act during an event for Stanford law students in Stanford, California, Monday. The bill, similar in some ways to a bill introduced by two U.S. senators earlier this month, introduces as a new wrinkle a bounty for the first person to report a spam offender, with a reward of 20 percent of the civil fine levied by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against the spammer.
The bounty for spammers is an idea that Lessig has been advancing for several months, and in January he publicly bet his job on the effectiveness of a bill that would offer a bounty. Lofgren's bill is "an example of be careful what you wish for," Lessig said Monday. The bet would get Lessig's detractors to "rally for this proposal," he added.
With a civil fine of up to $10 per offending piece of e-mail, the potential bounty for those who report spam violations could be in the thousands of dollars, a spokesman for Lofgren said. Fines could be in the "magnitude of the thousands," the spokesman said.
The bill could be effective "because prosecutors have better things to do than tracking down spammers," Lessig said. "It will soon be not worth it to send out 10,000 human growth hormone e-mails a day."
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Windows Server 2003: Early Users Take the Plunge
Microsoft Corp. launched its long-delayed Windows Server 2003 operating system last week, but some users couldn't wait.
Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. and JetBlue Airways Corp. jumped from Windows 2000 Server to the Windows 2003 beta to gain a performance edge and pursue server consolidation.
Meanwhile, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) and Intrawest Corp. took the plunge in hopes that Active Directory would help rein in the many domain controllers they had with Windows NT 4.0.
Windows Server 2003 promises improvements in performance, scalability, reliability, security, manageability, networking and its integrated .Net development framework. But migrating to a new server operating system is no snap for any IT shop, once the planning, testing and potential disruption to end users are factored into the equation.
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Stopping SARS: A Search for Drugs
Scientists trying to defeat severe acute respiratory syndrome are testing various treatments developed for other viral diseases like AIDS in the hope that existing drugs might help combat the growing epidemic.
Health officials have solicited contributions from private companies already testing drugs for other indications and received hundreds of responses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Finding a successful treatment for SARS is particularly challenging, researchers say, because the virus responsible for the disease appears to be mutating as it spreads, making it a moving target.
One family of treatments that may prove useful is antisense drugs, which adjust themselves to various mutations in the body. AVI BioPharma has sent some of its antisense drugs for testing at the National Institutes of Health, and the results should be available in the next several weeks.
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Users Want More From Windows Server 2003
Even as Microsoft Corp. rolled out its Windows Server 2003 product family last week, some of its largest enterprise customers were calling for greater interoperability with the Unix and Linux systems already in place in their IT infrastructures.
Jeff O'Dell (pictured), vice president of architecture for health benefits provider Cigna Corp., in Bloomington, Conn., which runs Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and is testing Windows Server 2003, has told Microsoft he intends to continue to operate in a multiplatform environment. So far, the company is listening.
"They are making it much more possible for us to use Windows in greater ways than we would have been able to in the past," O'Dell said. "I am encouraged by the progress that they have made in working towards greater interoperability."
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