| |
April 29, 2003
|
 |
Song-swap fight to go on despite defeat
The music industry pledged this week to fight on with its global legal battle to stifle online copyright abuse despite last week's unexpected setback in a U.S. court.
U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson on Friday dealt a major blow to the major music labels and Hollywood studios in their fight against online piracy, ruling Internet file-sharing services Grokster and Morpheus can remain open for business.
Judge Wilson ruled Grokster and Morpheus could not be shut down because they cannot control what is traded over their systems even if the material exchanged is copyright-protected.
In contrast, the original song-trading network Napster was shut down by a U.S. federal court judge two years ago as its older technology hosted a central index of copyrighted files.
|
|
|
Microsoft publishes security guides for admins
Microsoft Corp. released a guide on April 25 to help systems administrators run Windows Server 2003 securely and reannounced a similar guide for Windows 2000 yesterday.
The Windows Server 2003 Security Guide and the Windows 2000 Security Hardening Guide for Windows 2000 Professional and Server editions give instructions on how to set up the software and how to mitigate various attack types, as well as other tips, said Michael Stephenson, lead product manager for Windows Server at Microsoft.
"We felt we needed to do a better job in helping our customers to better secure their products," he said.
Microsoft found that an overwhelming majority of the security breaches its customers have suffered resulted from configuration mistakes. These included unpatched systems and unprotected administrative accounts on servers, Stephenson said.
The guides walk administrators through the best practices for setting up a Windows Server system in a variety of configuration scenarios, including file server, Web server, domain controller and Domain Name System server, Stephenson said.
|
|
|
Tablet PC receives Pentium M boost
Motion Computing plans to put a little more swing into its tablet PC next month.
The Austin, Texas-based start-up plans to release the M1300, a tablet PC based on Intel's new 900MHz ultra-low-voltage version of the Pentium M.
The M1300, set for release on May 12, will offer a performance boost of up to 33 percent over the company's current tablet model, the M1200, Scott Eckert, Motion's CEO, said Tuesday.
Motion will release the M1300, which is one of the first portables to use the 900MHz ultra-low-voltage Pentium M, into a market that has embraced tablets with unexpected vigor.
|
|
|
Report: Chip sales to grow--till 2006
Worldwide chip sales are expected to rise 16.7 percent in 2003, largely driven by an anticipated upturn in business spending, according to a report released Tuesday by In-Stat/MDR.
Global chip revenue should bring in $164.2 billion this year, with most of the growth occurring in the second half of the year, the report says. The anticipated double-digit growth is in stark contrast to the meager 1.3 percent revenue growth that the industry fared last year, when a surge in DRAM (dynamic RAM) sales helped the industry to post positive growth, according to Steve Cullen, an In-Stat research director.
Although a chip recovery is predicted this year, Cullen said he remains cautiously optimistic.
|
|
|
Hunt for Stolen Iraqi Antiquities Moves to Cyberspace
The hunt is on for priceless antiquities looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. The international effort is playing out in Baghdad, at Iraq's borders-and now in cyberspace. Scholars at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute have launched a Web site that could help trap antiquities smugglers. It also affords a virtual glimpse of antiquities stolen from the museum collection.
Many priceless Mesopotamian artifacts are missing from the Iraq Museum following its well-publicized looting. International experts say professional thieves were behind the job. Museum records were partially destroyed during the museum rampage, leaving the world with only a scattering of digital images and information on missing artifacts.
The full extent of the theft remains sketchy. Some hold out hope that most treasured artifacts were moved for safekeeping. Some artifacts have trickled back to the museum, intercepted by authorities or returned by citizens under an amnesty agreement. But most artifacts have yet to surface.
|
|
|
Licensed to War Drive in N.H.
A land where white pines easily outnumber wireless computer users, New Hampshire may seem an unlikely haven for the free networking movement.
But the state, known for its Live Free or Die motto, could become the first in the United States to provide legal protection for people who tap into insecure wireless networks.
A bill that's breezing through New Hampshire's legislature says operators of wireless networks must secure them -- or lose some of their ability to prosecute anyone who gains access to the networks.
House Bill 495 would, experts say, effectively legalize many forms of what's known as war driving -- motoring through an inhabited area while scanning for open wireless access points.
Increasingly popular with businesses and consumers, wireless networks use radio waves to transmit data between computers in a network. The convenient, low-cost equipment often is deployed to allow employees or household members to share a single Internet connection.
To simplify installation, wireless systems typically ship without any security features enabled. Because the radio waves broadcast by wireless base stations are relatively powerful, it's not uncommon for residential neighbors or adjacent businesses to inadvertently connect to each other's wireless networks.
|
|
|
Storage gadgets, gimmicks at trade show
Those who want to try out networked storage on the cheap might keep an eye out for the NetDisk from Ximeta Technology.
The Irvine, Calif.-based start-up is using the Networld+Interop trade show here to launch a portable hard drive that plugs directly into an Ethernet network. The same drive also can be taken off the network and attached to a single PC as a USB 2.0 hard drive. The idea, says Ximeta President Edward Park, is to offer a portable drive that can be used by a whole work group in the office and then be taken home. Prices range from $269 for an 80GB drive to $399 for a 160GB drive.
Ximeta calls the concept a "Network Direct Attached Storage" device, further blurring the lines between storage that is connected to a PC or server and attached to a network.
|
|
|
HP plans Itanium-Windows workstation
Hewlett-Packard, co-inventor of Intel's new Itanium processor line, will begin selling its zx2000 and zx6000 workstations with Microsoft's new Itanium version of Windows in mid-May, the company said Tuesday.
The zx2000 comes with a single 900MHz Itanium 2 with 1.5MB of high-speed cache memory and costs between $3,711 and $5,832. The zx6000 comes with one or two processors, either the 900MHz model or a 1GHz Itanium 2 with 3MB of cache, and has a price range of $6,905 to $15,135.
Both systems will be available for order Thursday and will begin shipping in mid-May, company spokeswoman Jean Shimoguchi said. They use Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003, which Microsoft released to manufacturers March 28.
|
|
|
California bill echoes Oracle blunder
Nine months after California canceled a scandal-dogged software contract with Oracle, state legislators met Tuesday to hear a bill that seeks to strengthen oversight of state information technology projects.
The measure, SB 791, was authored by Sen. Dean Florez, the legislator who led state legislative hearings last year into a $95 million no-bid Oracle contract. Under the contract, the state had agreed to license database software for more than 250,000 employees.
The hearings were prompted by a state audit report that estimated the contract would cost California $41 million, rather than save the state $100 million over six to 10 years, as Oracle contended.
|
|
|
Apple sells Net tunes for a song: 99 cents
Apple Computer Inc. unveiled its long-awaited online music service this week, promising to make the process of buying music on the Internet simple and affordable.
The company said it aimed to make its Internet-based iTunes Music Store service cheap enough to compete with free, file-swapping sites the record industry blames for its slump.
Apple said on Monday its iTunes Music software was immediately available for its own Macintosh computers, while a Windows version would be available by the end of the year.
In addition to downloading songs for 99 cents each, users would be allowed to burn songs on an unlimited number of CDs for personal use and download them on up to three computers.
|
|
|
Intel teaches computers to lip-read
Open source software released to help computers understand spoken commands.
Intel has released open source speech-recognition software that teaches computers to "read" users lips.
Combined with face detection algorithms from Intel's OpenCV computer vision library, the company's Audio Visual Speech Recognition software allows computers to track mouth movements and enhance speech applications in noisy environments.
The accuracy of current speech recognition software is limited by background noise, with the result that users often have to rely on specialist headsets or find a suitable quiet place, the company said.
"Human recognition is seldom based on a single type of information," said Justin Rattner, director of the company's Microprocessor Research Labs, in a statement.
|
|
|
Mobile promos drop off McDonald's menu
McDonald's has pulled the plug on a pioneering marketing push based on text messaging, but the move doesn't bode ill for such campaigns, say analysts.
In the past few weeks, the fast food chain closed a free U.K. service that sent text messages about special deals to members' phones, according to a representative for marketing agency 12snap, which ran the campaign.
McDonald's decision to end the promotional push, one of the first to tap into text messaging, was part of an overall cut in European marketing budgets, said the 12snap representative. "They've looked at marketing across the board--not just mobile--and had to make some cuts," the representative said. "It was right last year, but not now."
|
|
|
Impact alert as X-ray satellite plummets to Earth
The 1400-kilogram BeppoSAX satellite is expected to break up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere on Tuesday evening, showering the area below its flight path with chunks of metal. Its equatorial orbit has been decaying since the satellite was switched off in April 2002.
A report from the Italian Space Agency (ASI), issued at 1105 GMT on Tuesday, estimates that the debris will hit the surface between 2035 this evening and 0517 on Wednesday morning. But they do not know yet where it will land.
After the satellite was switched off it became impossible to communicate with the spacecraft. Its location is being tracked with help from NASA, but it cannot be steered.
|
|
|
First SARS Case 'Presumed'
A Korean entered the country via Air China flight CA123 on Monday at 11:30 a.m. and was categorized as a "suspected SARS patient" after an examination, and was later classed as a "presumed SARS patient," the National Institute of Health said Tuesday. The terms are official ones used by the World Health Organization. The man, who was not identified, was returning to Korea after finishing a two-month language course in Beijing.
An official at the health institute, Kim Moon-sik, explained, "At Incheon Airport, the man's temperature was up to 38.2 degrees Celsius [100.7 degrees Fahrenheit] and he had muscle aches." Kim said the man was isolated at a hospital for further inspections and that X-ray results showed that he was infected with pneumonia, indicating that he had SARS.
Still, Kim said that the possibility that the man had fallen ill because of a non-SARS virus had not been excluded.
|
|
|
EMC, Cisco switch deal is on
EMC is announcing Tuesday that it will resell a storage switch from Cisco Systems as part of a long-anticipated partnership between the two companies.
Under the deal, the company will sell Cisco's MDS 9000 family of switches under the EMC name. The EMC-branded switch can be managed using both Cisco and EMC software, though EMC's software will have limited abilities at first. The switch should be available later this quarter, the companies said.
The partnership is not the first for either company. EMC plans to sell a rival "intelligent switch" from Brocade Communications Systems, while Cisco has already signed deals to sell its storage switch through IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
|
|
|
|
