| Friday, 30 January 2004, 4:01 pm Tags: |
The weekend is almost upon us!
The Beatles made their last public appearance on the roof of Abbey Road studios on this day in 1969. The neighbors shut the concert down due to the noise. Kiss played their first show on this day four years later. Coincidence? Have you ever seen Paul McCartney and Gene Simmons in the same room?
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on this day.
- Microsoft has added $250,000 to the bounty for the capture of the creator of MyDoom. Combined with the reward already offered by SCO, that puts a cool half-million on the head of the virus creator. Law enforcement has a poor track record of catching virus authors, but this might provide a hefty incentive to his cohorts to turn the loser in. We can but hope.
- Gateway is offering $235 million for eMachines. Gateway has been struggling lately while e-machines fortune has been on the rise. Gateway CEO, the pony-tailed Ted Waitt, will step aside to let eMachines’s Wayne Inouye run the combined company which will be the third largest in the nation after Dell and HP.
- NASA is reconsidering its decision to let the Hubble space telescope rot. Common misconception: it’s not due to budget cuts, it’s just not safe to use the Shuttle to fix it.
- A Dutch court has ruled that the Lindows Linux distribution can’t use the name Lindows because it’s too close to Windows. Still OK to use the name in the US.
- Microsoft is going to hold off on browser changes due to the Eolas patent. Apparently Redmond is hoping the US Patent office will overturn the patent.
- The second annual list of the top 10 web security flaws is out from the Open Web Application Security Project. Makes you want to stay offline.
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| Thursday, 29 January 2004, 3:40 pm Tags: |
Headlines from the wonderful world of technology.
Happy Birthday WC Fields.
- Apple is finally offering free repairs for iBooks with faulty logic boards. Customers had been petitioning the company to fix the flawed iBooks for some time. The repair program covers iBooks made between May 2002 and April 2003 with serial numbers between UV220XXXXXX to UV318XXXXXX. This is undoubtedly in response to the fact that I finally recycled my non-working iBook on Sunday.
- MyDoom.B, a variant of the email virus that is being decried as the fastest spreading virus ever, now targets Microsoft instead of SCO. It also blocks several anti-virus sites to make it harder to remove and stops pop-up ads. Hey, that’s not so bad.
- A groggy Spirit has sent back its first picture from Mars since it went AWOL last week. No truth to the rumor that the picture was of a discarded high heel shoe and an empty bottle of champagne.
- Intel and AMD continue to slug it out. Intel will be announcing its new desktop Pentium IV on Monday, code named Prescott, and both companies plan price reductions for the same day.
- Scientists have created a new form of matter, fermionic condensate, which may make room temperature superconductors feasible. Researchers in the porn industry are already hard at work trying to figure out how to make money on the discovery.
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| Wednesday, 28 January 2004, 2:33 pm Tags: |
Today’s technology news.
The space shuttle Challenger exploded on this day in 1986 killing all seven astronauts aboard.
- The collateral damage from MyDoom continues to reverberate through email systems. As much as 10% of all email is MyDoom related – either the virus itself or bounce mails from corporate and ISP virus filters. One of the targets of MyDoom, SCO, is offering a $250,000 bounty for the virus’s author.
- The US Government is responding by creating an early warning system for cyberattacks. The Department of Homeland Security will announce a color coded alert system that should make us all feel much better about being flooded by virus related email.
- Word 2003 users should download a patch that fixes more than 400 bugs. Office now has an update feature that works just like Windows Update – probably worth bookmarking that and checking it regularly.
- Amazon has shown a nice profit for the year just ending, $35.3 million on revenue of $5.26 billion. This is the online retailers first full year profit ever.
- Me too, me too! Microsoft has released a beta of the MSN Toolbar to compete with Google and Yahoo! offerings. Only one problem: it uses MSN for its search engine. Pew.
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| Tuesday, 27 January 2004, 3:39 pm Tags: |
News time…
Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Macintosh team, has created a wonderful Mac history on Foklore.org.
Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated TV for the first time on this day in 1926. Apollo astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, died in a launch pad fire on this day in 1967.
- There’s a nasty virus coming your way. MyDoom or Novarg, depending on which anti-virus company you listen to, is spreading faster than any email virus since SoBig, probably because the email it comes in features such pseudo-tech speak as “The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment.” and “Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available.” Works better than pictures of Anna Kournikova these days.
Besides sending itself to everyone in the victim’s address book, MyDoom also adds itself to Kazaa’s shared files posing as a pirated application, and then lies in wait for a planned attack on the SCO Corporation’s web site on February 1st. The virus also installs a backdoor and a keylogger.
- HP has announced it will use the Opteron in its new line of ProLiant servers. A big win for AMD.
- Experts say we’ll see an end to spam around 2006. No thanks to the Federal SPAM-CAN act. Since it became the law of the land spam has actually increased to 60% of all mail, but stepped up enforcement and address verification requirements by the big ISPs should begin to take hold by the end of this year, according the Brightmail CEO, Enrique Salem.
- The European Union is close to a judgment on the Microsoft anti-trust case.
- SlashDot reports that Dell is offering PCs without Windows for the first time since their failed Linux flirtation. The business PCs come with FreeDOS instead.
- Out of the way Wi-Fi, here comes UltraWideband, a wireless technology that’s faster and lower power. That makes it better suited to TV and other entertainment connections according to chipmaker Texas Instruments.
- The William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library will feature 40 million emails sent by staff, and two sent by the Prez himself. Actually one doesn’t count, because it was a test email to see if Clinton could figure out how to use the send button. (Don’t Presidents have people to do that stuff for them?) The lone actual email: a message to John Glenn aboard the space shuttle.
- We’re not the only species that sends out virus warnings. According to a new Penn State study, corn plants can warn each other about oncoming infestation.
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| Friday, 23 January 2004, 5:17 pm Tags: |
Celebrate good times. The Macintosh turns 20 tomorrow.
Bob Keeshan, “Captain Kangaroo,” passed away today.
- Google is taking on Friendster. Yesterday the search giant quietly launched Orkut.com. The site says it’s “online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends.” But membership is by invitation ONLY. So where does the name come from? It’s a personal project by Orkut Buyukkokten, a Stanford CS PhD who does user interface design for Google. Google asks all its engineers to spend one day a week working on personal projects in hopes of generating new businesses.
- What is the world coming to? The DVD Copy Control Association (who?) has dropped charges against a California man who posted the DeCSS code to decrypt DVDs. The DVDCCA says they’re following an “evolving legal strategy.” Looks like the hundreds of pending cases against other web sites who posted DeCSS will be dropped, as well.
- Meanwhile, Macrovision is relaxing its audio CD copy protection to make it more like iTunes. The record companies would be able to set usage rules for each disc, allowing copying, ripping, burning, or not.
- And Winzip and PKWare have zipped and made up. The competing publishers of Zip software have agreed on a single interoperable standard for the zip file format. The format threatened to fragment with incompatible encryption add-ons from both companies.
- A US District judge in Los Angeles has ruled that Sharman Networks, makers of Kazaa, can sue the movie and record companies. Sharman alleges that in their effort to catch people sharing files illegally, the labels and studios used unauthorized and unlicensed versions of Kazaa to monitor users of the network. Interesting tactic. We’ll see if it works.
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| Thursday, 22 January 2004, 5:31 pm Tags: |
You make me want to shout yeaaaaagh, it’s news time.
KGO Radio in San Francisco celebrates 80 years on air today. Laugh-In premiered in 1968. Happy Chinese New Year – it’s the year of the monkey.
- Uh oh. Spirit’s gone silent. Maybe it’s afraid of the RIAA, too?
- A Federal panel says the government’s Internet-based absentee voting systemis fatally flawed. The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) system being built for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) has serious, unfixable, security flaws according to an oversight panel. The experts are recommending the program be shut down immediately.
- Microsoft says you’ll have to wait until at least February 10 for a fix to the Internet Explorer “phishing” exploit.
- According to the Boston Globe, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee hacked into the Dems computer files and spied on them for a year.
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| Wednesday, 21 January 2004, 3:31 pm Tags: |
Time for news.
Dentist Howard Wells who pioneered the use of medical anesthesia was born on this day in 1815. The envelope folding machine was patented in 1853. First dedicated sewage disposal system in the US was opened in 1880 in Memphis. Artificial heart recipient Barney Clark was born in 1921. The first atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus, was launched in 1954. The Concorde first took off in 1976.
Wired News’s Vaporware awards are out. A lifetime achievement award goes to Duke Nukem Forever.
- The Recording Industry Association of America is at it again, filing law suits against 532 “John Does” identified only by IP address. The US Court of Appeals prohibited the RIAA from subpoenaing ISPs directly last December, so this round of suits doesn’t name the swappers but does request information from their ISPs. The RIAA says it’s only targeting “egregious” sharers offering over 800 songs for download.
- There’s a new bug named Beagle that’s turning home computers into spamming machines. It comes in as an email attachment. SARC has a removal tool.
- Nintentendo’s not dead yet. The company has announced a new handheld with dual screens, dual processors, and up to a gig of system memory. The two screens will be used to display two different perspectives on the game, or a map and a game view. The company is withholding further details until E3 in May.
- Microsoft’s considering opening the Office source code to selected corporate customers.
- Mike Rowe’s anything but Soft. Microsoft corp is trying to shut down a BC teen’s site: mikerowesoft.com because it’s too close to MS’s own name. The 17-year-old is fighting back. The attention has brought 250,000 people to his site.
- SPEWS has added DSLReports to its block list. A case of mistaken identity says the owner.
- Coca-Cola’s music site has gone live. Visit it if you can stand the Flash.
- Survey says: the most hated invention in America is the cell phone. Oops, gotta take this call. See you tomorrow.
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| Thursday, 15 January 2004, 3:05 pm Tags: |
You asked for it. Here’s the news (round 1):
- A big victory for Eolas in its patent suit against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. A Chicago federal appeals court judge upheld Eolas’s $512 million judgment. Microsoft will appeal. Eolas and UC Berkeley claim the patent to web pages that call up other programs like Java, Quicktime, or ActiveX to display content. IE will be crippled by the judgement. The W3C and others are searching desperately for prior art to overturn the patent – the PTO is investigating.
- ISPs unite to fight spam. Bell Canada, BellSouth, Cox Communications, Internet Initiative Japan, NII Holdings, Openwave Systems and other ISPs have joined together to form the ISP Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. Companies are particularly worried about spam clogging wireless services. They’ll create a “neighborhood watch” to share information about spammers, hoping to block them at the network’s edge. Given the pathetic federal SPAM-CAN act (have you noticed any drop in spam since it was enacted Jan 1?), it looks like the ISPs are our last best hope.
- HP made $2.5 billion on its Linux business in fiscal 2003, more than twice IBM’s revenue in 2002 and up 49% from last year.
- We’re back baby! Intel announced yesterday that its net for Q4 was $2.2 billion – more than double last quarter, and Yahoo! made a pretty penny, too. Q4 earnings were a healthy $75 million mostly from ads and paid searches.
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| Wednesday, 14 January 2004, 3:23 pm Tags: |
It’s time for tech news!
Carlo Ponzi, creator of the scam that bears his name, immigrated to America on this day in 1896. Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1914. The FCC removed restrictions on the number of commercials per hour radio stations could air in 1981. The Simpsons premiered in 1990.
- The January patches are here! The January patches are here! This month’s crop of security fixes from Microsoft include patches for Exchange Server, MDAC, and its H.323 implementation for voice over IP (VoIP). Still no fix for the URL spoofing bug in IE that makes it easier to fish for personal information. Read all about the things they did fix here. The H.323 problem is widespread according to CERT.
- No WMA for iPod after all. Contrary to Paul Thurrot’s report in WinInfo, HP says it will not add support for the Microsoft audio format to the HP-branded iPod. An HP spokesman said, “Most customers don’t care about the format they’re downloading.” Not until they try to play their Napster or Wal-Mart music store files on the iPod and can’t.
- We’re on for Mars. President Bush is expected to lay out his plans today to send a manned expedition to the Red Planet within the next 20 years.
- “You’re too fat.” That’s what a Burger King drive through customer heard when he tried to order a Whopper. Turns out the drive-thru’s wireless system had been hacked.
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| Tuesday, 13 January 2004, 3:22 pm Tags: |
Tuesday is news day.
The first frisbee was produced by Wham-O on this day in 1957. The YMCA sued the Village People for libel in 1979. The Friday the 13th virus struck in 1989.
- A California judge has ruled that claims processed through MSFreePC.com are invalid and that customers who want to benefit from Microsoft’s $1.1 billion settlement with the state have to file the paperwork by hand. MSFreePC.com was set up by Michael Robertson’s Lindows to encourage users to claim court mandated rebates from Microsoft and use them to buy Lindows-based PCs. Microsoft asserted that the electronic claims forms were illegal. Robertson said that Microsoft’s “true intentions are not to remedy their abusive pricing policies but simply to escape financial redress to Californians.” The court agreed with Microsoft.
- Novell completes its acquisition of SuSE Linux today, and joins HP in indemnifying large corporations against any liability in the SCO lawsuits.
- A Federal judge has ruled in favor of BadBusinessBureau.com in a defamation lawsuit filed by a cookware manufacturer. The site, which also goes under the name RipOffReport.com, features consumer complaints about a variety of companies.
- Spirit hasn’t even left its platform yet, but the Mars rover may have already detected signs of ancient water on the red planet. This would be a significant finding, since water seems to be a prerequisite for life.
- From Slashdot: If you’re looking for absolution with your toner cartridges, look no farther than LaserMonks, a group of Cistercian monks in Wisconsin who support themselves by selling printer cartridges out of their monastery.
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