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April 9, 2003
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ACLU loses digital copyright battle
The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday lost its first attempt to challenge a controversial 1998 copyright law.
In a strongly worded decision, a federal judge in Boston dismissed a lawsuit aimed at defanging part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The ACLU's suit, filed against filtering-software company N2H2 last July, claims the law unconstitutionally interferes with researchers' ability to investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of Internet filtering software.
"There is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that...outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted property from an invasive and destructive trespass," U.S. District Judge Richard Sterns wrote.
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Saturn's new moon
Astronomers at the University of Hawaii, US, have found the first new satellite of Saturn in three years.
The discovery has been made by the same team that recently announced it had found a clutch of new moons around Jupiter.
They point out that until now Saturn was the only gas giant planet not to have a new satellite discovery announced in the past year.
The latest discovery means there 31 known moons of Saturn. Jupiter has 58.
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High-tech leaders join on trust, security standards
The 3-year-old Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) is being replaced with a new industry group that will establish trust and security standards for all kinds of software and hardware, from computers to handhelds and cellular phones.
In an announcement (download PDF) yesterday, the new Trusted Computing Group (TCG) said it will expand the reach of the old TCPA beyond the PC platform to bring the standards to a new range of offerings not imagined when the original group was formed in October 1999.
Anne Price, a spokeswoman for Portland, Ore.-based TCG, said the new nonprofit body will have other changes from the former alliance that it's replacing. The TCG will have membership dues and a logo program through which vendors will be able to label products that conform with the TCG's specifications on trust and security. The group will also create and adopt standards to drive consumer and business confidence in future devices.
"The idea is that security would be ubiquitous," Price said. "It's not just PCs anymore."
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Microsoft Warns of Virtual Machine Flaws
Microsoft warned users on Wednesday about two new security vulnerabilities affecting its Microsoft Virtual Machine, Microsoft Proxy Server 2.0, and Microsoft ISA Server 2000 products.
The Microsoft Virtual Machine (VM) contains a critical vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to gain control of affected machines, according to security bulletin MS03-011.
The vulnerability, which occurs in code for a VM process called the ByteCode Verifier, could enable an attacker to use illegal sequences of byte codes to bypass security checks in the software, Microsoft said.
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Dolly the Sheep Goes on Display
Dolly the sheep, who died two months ago, has been preserved and is set to take centre stage in the museum's Science Zone later this week.
She will go on to become a permanent feature at the museum later this year.
Dolly was born on 5 July 1996 but the decision was taken to euthanase her after a veterinary examination showed that she had a progressive lung disease.
The six-year-old had been created by the Roslin Institute research centre near Edinburgh.
It has now been announced that Dolly will go on display at the city's Royal Museum between 11 and 22 April.
She will play a key role in the Science Zone, a series of events and workshops running in parallel with the Edinburgh International Science Festival.
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GM pulling plug on electric cars
The celebrated ride of the car that spawned the nation's toughest emissions regulation ends at a parking lot in Southern California, where a growing fleet of General Motors electric cars awaits an uncertain fate.
Dozens of the green, metallic blue and bright red futuristic autos are lined up behind a chain-link fence at the edge of a freight rail line in Van Nuys, a sure sign the world's largest automaker has pulled the plug on a vehicle it heralded as recently as two years ago as "the car of the future."
As California retreats from its strict pollution regulation, GM is taking the cars off the road when leases expire because it can no longer supply parts to repair them, said GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss.
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