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Atari Online News, Etc. Volume 06 Issue 03
Volume 6, Issue 3 Atari Online News, Etc. January 16, 2004
Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2004
All Rights Reserved
Atari Online News, Etc.
A-ONE Online Magazine
Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor
Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor
Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor
Atari Online News, Etc. Staff
Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor
Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking"
Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile"
Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips"
Rob Mahlert -- Web site
Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame"
With Contributions by:
Kevin Savetz
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=~=~=~=
A-ONE #0603 01/16/04
~ #1 Place To Go: Yahoo! ~ People Are Talking! ~ New ARAnyM beta!
~ PayPal Scam Has Worm! ~ MS Extends W98 Support ~ Sir Berners-Lee!
~ Escape Paint Additions ~ Potato Computer Scam?! ~ New UDO Release!
~ Linux Gets Defense Fund ~ Microsoft To Pay Fine! ~ Geek Image Changes!
-* New Anti-Spam Tools Falter! *-
-* Judge Orders Indian Firm to End Spam *-
-* Spam Accounts For Two-thirds of All E-Mail *-
=~=~=~=
->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!"
""""""""""""""""""""""""""
I know, I know - last week I told you all that it was cold here in the
Northeast. Well, I was wrong! This week was cold; last weekend was warm in
comparison! We're setting all kinds of records for cold temperatures this
week. As I sit here putting together this week's issue, I looked over at my
PC next to me and see my WeatherCast icon depicting 0 degrees - and it's
going to drop even more overnight. I heard that when I leave for work in
the morning tomorrow, it's supposed to be about ten below zero, without the
wind chill factored in! What that weather report doesn't explicitly show is
the wind speeds and wind-chill temperatures. I don't think I've seen this
kind of weather since I was a kid growing up in Maine. And at that age, we
didn't really care about the cold as long as we kept moving! And yes, the
foolish dogs still want to go out to see what's going on outside - one more
trip tonight and that's it for them for the day! This weekend, they predict
"balmy" weather - between 15 and 25 degrees! Stay warm!
Until next time...
=~=~=~=
ARAnyM 0.8.5 beta Released
New versions of ARAnyM and AFROS are available for free download
http://aranym.atari.org/
New Plugins for Escape Paint
Jens Syckor has developed two new plugins for the excellent (freeware)
Escape Paint graphics program for Falcon.
The new plugins are:
- A Greyscale filter
- A PNG loading module
http://spion.atari.org
UDO v6.4.0 Released
The new UDO release v6.4.0 covers many bug fixes and an improved memory
management.
URL: http://www.udo-open-source.org
=~=~=~=
PEOPLE ARE TALKING
compiled by Joe Mirando
joe@atarinews.org
Hidi ho friends and neighbors. As Dana mentioned last week, it's darned
cold here in the northeast. It's the coldest it's been in the past 20
years, and to tell you the truth, I don't like it. <grin>
It's not just the temperature, it's also the strong wind coming down
from the north. With the wind chill figured in, it's going to feel like
more than 30 degrees below zero.
The house we live in is old... about 160 years old... and there are all
kinds of little creaks and groans all the time. I don't mind that. It's
part of its charm. What I DO mind is the drafts.
I'm one of those cold-weather people. I prefer the cold weather to heat,
so it's not that I can't take a little chill. It's that I hate the idea
that a lot of the heat that the furnace is generating is leaking to the
outside. We don't own the house, we rent it, so it's not like I'm going
to renovate.
But you know, it's really a good place to be. And they're finding that
homes that are sealed up tight aren't really all that good either...
they allow all kinds of stuff to linger in the house instead of getting
"blown" out through the cracks. All that "dust and allergen" stuff just
hangs around and waits for you to breathe it in.
So I guess there really are at least two ways to look at everything.
Like the new American 'space initiative'. Sure, I'm a space buff. Always
was, always will be. But I worry that it's a bit too ambitious. Sometimes
when you bite off more than you can chew, you lose your taste for it all
together. I'd hate to see that happen. I mean, heck, we've already been
standing still for too long in my opinion. Sure, we've made strides in
remote rovers and orbiting telescopes, but that's exploration by proxy.
And, yes, the pictures and data we're getting back from the first rover
(http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/index.html) is really, really cool, but
we've done this before with Pathfinder. And while Columbus made several
trips to the new world, it's the first voyage that we always remember,
isn't it?
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be going to Mars with robotic probes.
There are still lots of things that we need to learn about that world
before one of us sets foot upon its soil. But I'm not really talking
about research, I'm talking about a vision. Let's face it, "Our reach
should ever exceed our grasp" just doesn't keep the money flowing when
you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.
I just checked, and the average temperature around 'Spirit' right now is
about 12 degrees F. It's -4 degrees F here right now. Man, I think it's
time for a vacation to Mars. <grin>
Now let's get to the news, hints, tips, and info from the UseNet:
From the comp.sys.atari.st NewsGroup
====================================
Mike Freeman asks about one of my favorite suites of applications... even
if I use it on another platform:
"I heard about the "Open Office" project from a friend of mine and
thought I'd check it out. It looks extremely cool! For those who don't
know, it's a MS Office-compatible office suite that's completely free
and open source, designed to be ported to any platform. It has a word
processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation program, and drawing
program, all able to load and save MS file formats, as well as others.
They've got just about every mainstream platform out there porting it
(Windows, MacOS X, Linux, FreeBSD, etc).
I was just wondering if anyone had considered trying to port it for
high-end Atari's (like Medusa/Hades/CT60/Aranym machines). It needs a
64Mb system, so that leaves most Atari-made machines without upgrades
out of the picture, but I would imagine it would help give people a
good reason to start buying the newer machines and upgrades. While we
do have software that can work with images, Word files, and *old*
Excel files, as well as more generic equivalents to the basic
WP/Spreadsheet/Database/Drawing software, we don't have any kind of
presentation software (like powerpoint) at all, and we don't have
anything with the features that Open Office has (like saving any
document as PDF by pressing a button on the toolbar, or saving Flash
files from drawings and presentations). If it's possible, I think it'd
be a good thing to port to our platform as well. That said, I don't
have any experience with the porting process, so I may be barking up
the wrong tree here. Any comments?
The Open Office web site is: http://www.openoffice.org/ "
Martin Tarenskeen tells Mike:
"Porting Open-Office to the Atari would be a huge effort.
In the Atari SpareMiNT project you will find many applications coming from
the Open-Source/Linux world, that have been ported to run with the Atari
FreeMiNT OS. Most of them are text based tools, but there are also a
number of apps using X. On my Atari Falcon/CT2b these graphical apps are
horribly slow. On a fast Linux based computer running Aranym things will
be more interesting. But in that case the question is: why should I waste
so much hard disk space to have Open Office running in my Aranym
environment, if I already have Open Office installed on the same hard disk
running directly under Linux ?
For the authentic "Atari feel" I'd rather use Papyrus Office or Tempus
Word in that situation, and switch to Linux to run Open Office.
But maybe some day in the (not so far) future someone will port Open
Office for FreeMiNT. You could have a fast Intel/AMD based computer with a
minimal Linux installation completely dedicated to Aranym. Maybe even boot
(almost) directly into Aranym. And then have all those wonderful Open
Source apps like Open Office and Gimp running on a virtual super Atari for
a very small price. ( Someone is actually working on porting the GIMP to
FreeMiNT. It's not so easy, but will eventually happen.)"
Greg Goodwin adds:
"The CT60 might be powerful enough (barely), but you are talking about
a lot of compiling. If the OSX team's problems are any indication,
it's not a trivial job.
I'd be thrilled if anyone succeeded though!"
'Jedidiah' takes it in a slightly different direction:
"Why not just port GNOME or KDE? That should yield quite a number of
useful applications. There are a number of office style applications
(abiword/gnumeric) developed for them.
Separated from X, those interfaces might even be able to run well on
older machines."
Mark Duckworth tells Jed:
"We're working on that. First step is getting GTK-2.2.4 (or any 2.x series
version) running under MiNT and it's proving quite a challenge. Nobody
mentioned it because we do not as of yet know it's possible. Gtk 1.x was
a great success but 2.x offers much better abstraction to allow something
like making it gem/vdi native. It should be interesting nonetheless."
'Tim' posts this about changing the look of his desktop:
"I am a TT030/Falcon030 user and would like to spruce up my TOS! I ran
across a site that had this screenshot up:
http://www.gregory.atari.pl/grafika/pap.gif
What OS and or tools are used to have this GUI? Looks cool. Not overly
done and I think it would be nice to do."
Adam Klobukowski tells Tim:
"It is Magic 6.x and Steward, and the program running is Papyrus."
Gerhard Stoll adds:
"The tool is Stewart <http://www.the-mclouds.de/>"
Ryan Underwood asks about his 'new' STE:
"I just unboxed a 1040 STE of unknown origin. It came with a generic
"multisync switchbox" and some diskettes. Well, I haven't a RGB monitor
handy nor a VGA that will work at the ST medium res, so I wired up a
composite cable to the lead of pin#2 and gnd inside the switchbox. (It's
my only 13pin cable...) I also floated the mono detect pin (4). Booting
up the ST, I see a green power light, an all white screen, and what
appears to be floppy access, but nothing else happens. What should I be
seeing here? (this is my first ST)
For what it's worth, I also grounded the mono detect, and then when it
boots up, on the TV it goes from a white screen to a blank screen with
rolling lines (I guess that is the composite sync signal that is also on
pin 2). Then I can kind of see the hi-res on my VGA monitor which I
plugged into the multisync adapter, but it is also all white and nothing
else happens.
>From what I read, it looks like after failing to boot from floppy I should
be seeing TOS. Is that true? If so, what should I look at first to try
to determine what the problem is that is preventing the machine from
getting to the desktop?"
Mark Duckworth tells Ryan:
"What you are seeing is precisely what you should be seeing. For some
reason unbeknown to me the ST's take around 40 seconds to show a desktop.
The floppy will light. To get around this, simply stick any sort
of normally formatted 720K floppy in the drive and it will go directly to
the desktop.
FYI, the TV cannot show mono. Hence you don't want to do anything with
the mono detect. You see those lines when you ground that pin
because your TV can't do ST-mono - and I would think it could possibly
damage your TV. Using a TV you are limited to ST-Medium and ST-Low
resolutions which to be honest on an ST are the most interesting ones
(ST-low, games).
It takes a while. Like 40 seconds. Just let it sit there for
what might seem like an eternity. You'll get a desktop with floppy
A and B icons. I can't imagine any good reason you wouldn't."
Ryan tells Mark:
"Now with knowing how the thing is supposed to function, I took the
"multisync switchbox" which had an audio output, a VGA 15-pin output (for
hi-res) and a RGB 9-pin output (I guess for low-res on a 1084S or similar).
I added a composite output, an audio input, and ran a new ground wire from
the ST 13-pin connector to the VGA plug since the signal ground had been
broken somehow inside the cable. Now I get a 320x200 green desktop on a
composite monitor when switch is in one position, and when switch is
flipped to the other position, it reboots and puts a 640x400 mono desktop
on my VGA monitor.
Looks like we are doing pretty good except for a few things:
1) The quality of the VGA is decently sharp now that the ground is fixed,
but it is "flickery". Is this normal? The composite video is stable but
slightly fuzzy like all composite video; there is no flicker to it at all.
2) When I switch from VGA to composite and back: whichever monitor is
_not_ currently being displayed upon, instead of receiving nothing at all
on its input, receives a messed up signal and goes out of sync. Is this
the fault of the switchbox I have, or normal behavior?
3) I ran a cracktro from a diskette I got with the system. After 2-3
minutes of letting the graphics/music demo run, the ST stops with two bomb
icons right next to each other in the middle of the screen, and the music
halts to a solid tone. I guess this is the system crashing. (?) What are
usual causes of this? There is no add-ons in the ST that I can see that
would be stressing it. It definitely has not been used for awhile. Does
the 4-inch dropfix address random bombs?
I did the 4 inch drop and it didn't change a thing, so I opened up the STe
and found an open cap and a few with ESR through the roof. I think my
problem is located there....
I booted it up this morning, this time bit my tongue while waiting, and
there's the desktop!"
Well folks, that's it for this week. Tune in again next week, same time,
same station, and be ready to listen to what they are saying when...
PEOPLE ARE TALKING
=~=~=~=
->In This Week's Gaming Section - "URU: Ages Beyond Myst"
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Warner Bros. Returns to Games!
Curbing Violent Computer Games?!
=~=~=~=
->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News!
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
New Myst Game Confounding, Beautiful
It's been a decade since the digital artisans at Cyan Worlds debuted
"Myst," a gorgeous video game which encouraged thoughtful exploration over
mindless violence.
Now we have "URU: Ages Beyond Myst." Although the most promising feature -
Internet play - isn't fully available, "URU" still sets a new standard in
peaceful armchair archaeology.
It's certainly a change from the violence-filled norm: there are no
bazookas for blasting giant multi-headed aliens, no blood-splattered
corpses littering the landscape.
Instead, you begin wandering under the brilliant sun in the New Mexico
desert. Soon you stumble upon a crack in the ground, which serves as a
gateway to more mysterious locations.
As the story goes, it's been 250 years since the ancient D'ni civilization
vanished from the depths of the earth. During their prime, the D'ni
invented a craft which allowed them to write "Linking Books" - magical
texts which let readers travel to various locations, called "Ages."
The D'ni Restoration Council, a group of present-day explorers, has begun
restoring the long-forgotten D'ni ages.
Your role? Uncover the many mysteries within in each age and learn
something about the D'ni in the process.
It's best to think of each age as a collection of puzzle pieces. You "win"
the game by touching all seven "journeys" - posters with a hand symbol
drawn on them - hidden in each age.
Reaching all the journeys often involves repairing or powering up various
machinery.
My only real complaint is that the puzzles can be painstakingly difficult.
In the Kadish Tolesa age, for example, I spent hours roaming around before
I figured that in order to open a door, I needed to match up a series of
rotating images with a panel of buttons that was located in a completely
different part of the age.
Your best bet is to scrutinize every button, lever and cave painting.
And for sanity's sake, keep a notebook and pencil handy. I found myself
constantly jotting down notes and scribbling maps. Many times, the
information helped solve a puzzle later on.
"URU" plays out in three dimensions, and that means goodbye to the flat
slideshow look of the original "Myst" and sequels "Riven" and "Exile."
The extra dimension provided moments straight out of a "Mario Brothers"
game - sometimes you'll have to jump over precipices, piles of rubble and
other obstacles.
"URU" can be maddeningly difficult but also soothes with rich artistic
spectacle.
Stellar, photorealistic graphics stopped me in my tracks. Everything has
an aged, careworn look, and there were small details, too: some metal
objects had a shiny chrome appearance, veined with just the right amount
of rust and wear.
From the murmur of a gentle breeze rustling through a stand of trees to
the gurgling of a waterfall, ambient sounds and new age music complete the
immersive effect.
What promises to be he game's biggest innovation is a multiplayer mode
where you can uncover additional ages and an unfolding story with other
people online.
Unfortunately, it's currently available by invitation only. Upon completion
of this review, Cyan Worlds had not sent me the e-mail invitation I need to
enter the subscription-based service.
Cyan Worlds took a risk releasing a game which rewards perception and
patience. We all should be thankful.
I suggest anyone who needs a break from reality pick up this $50 game and
heed the advice of the game makers: "Close the door, turn down the lights,
turn up the volume, and experience URU as if you were actually there. ...
And remember the journey is the reward."
Three stars out of four.
Warner Bros. Sets Up Video Game Division
Movie studio Warner Bros., moving to embrace the fast-growing video game
industry which increasingly competes with Hollywood for entertainment
dollars, on Wednesday said it was setting up its own games division.
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment will continue the studio's work
building deals with developers and licensing content, and will also house a
division called Warner Bros. Games that will develop and distribute titles
under its own brand name. Warner Bros. is a unit of Time Warner Inc.
The new division, reporting to both senior entertainment and consumer
products executives, will be headed by Jason Hall, formerly co-founder and
chief executive of game developer Monolith Productions, which did work on
the "Matrix" video games for Warner Bros.
Hall, who will hold the title of senior vice president, Warner Bros.
Interactive Entertainment, told Reuters his job will be to keep Warner
Bros. from struggling in the game business as other studios have done.
"I sat in the game industry on the other side of the table for a very long
time watching film studios try and try," he said. "Here comes the
opportunity for me to take Warner Bros. into the game industry and make
them significantly relevant to the game industry and the future of the game
industry."
Movie studios have had something of a mixed record with games divisions in
past years, entering and exiting the business repeatedly.
DreamWorks had its own game unit, which it ended up selling to industry
leader Electronic Arts Inc. Last year, Fox Entertainment Group's movie unit
sold its games business to Vivendi Universal Games, itself a licensee from
Universal Studios, both units of French media group Vivendi Universal.
Warner Bros. has been affiliated with games companies numerous times in
past, from the period when the then-Warner Communications owned Atari to
Time Warner's 1990s-era interest in game developer Inscape.
"The first thing I need to do is to get the message out to the consumer,
to the game industry, to the other industries that are paying attention
to this, that Warner Bros. should not be viewed any longer as not taking
the game industry very seriously," Hall said.
Warner Bros.-licensed games have been very successful in the recent past,
particularly "Harry Potter" games at Electronic Arts and "Enter the Matrix"
at Atari Inc.. The studio has generally been more aggressive than most with
licensing and promotion.
One problem, though, is a perception among players that games based on
movies are often of low quality because they are rushed to market and
underfunded.
"I'll be damned if that's going to happen under my watch," Hall said.
He said he intends to tap Warner Bros. library for material in addition to
working with its new properties. Some development will be internal, he
said, while some properties will be licensed and some will be co-published.
"It is obvious to practically everyone that the video game business is very
relevant to profitability, the extension of film franchises, the consumer
perception of how powerful your content is," Hall said.
Florida City Aims to Curb Violent Computer Games
A Florida city is determined to pass a law restricting children's access to
violent computer games despite legal challenges to similar attempts
elsewhere, and charges of censorship, its mayor said on Friday.
The ordinance proposed by North Miami City Council was prompted by fury in
Miami's large Haitian American community at Rockstar Game's top-selling
"Grand Theft Auto: Vice City," in which players are urged to "kill the
Haitians."
Rockstar owners Take-Two Interactive Software Inc have agreed to cut the
offending remarks from future issues.
"This is not about censorship, it's about inciting violence," said Mayor
Joe Celestin, a Haitian American. "We're going to take it all the way."
"If you say 'kill the bad guy,' I have no problem," Celestin told Reuters.
"But when you target a race of people and say kill all the Haitians because
they are drug dealers, gangsters and voodoo worshipers, and you get $2,000
for killing the Haitians, that is the kind of thing that, if you want your
children to play that video, I think parental consent is required."
The proposal, which won preliminary approval from the council this week but
still has to go through a second vote, would impose a $250 fine on
retailers who sell or rent to a minor, without parental approval, a game in
which players kill or cause harm "to a human form."
The ordinance sparked criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union,
which says it could cover everything but "Tom and Jerry, maybe," and
interfered with the parent-child relationship, and from retailers.
"Have they ever watched Cartoon Network?" North Miami video store owner Bob
Richardson told the Miami Herald newspaper. "It's the most violent network
on television."
North Miami's bid to restrict the distribution of violent games is not a
first in the United States. But all such attempts have proven unsuccessful
to date.
U.S. Rep. Joe Baca, a California Democrat, has repeatedly tried to get
backing for a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to make it a
federal misdemeanor to sell violent games to minors.
A similar St. Louis County, Missouri, law was struck down by a federal
appeals court, which ruled that games were a protected form of free speech,
and a judge blocked a Washington state law that would have restricted sales
of games depicting violence against law enforcement officers.
=~=~=~=
A-ONE's Headline News
The Latest in Computer Technology News
Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson
Inbox Trauma: New Anti-Spam Tools Falter
Software makers have spent millions of dollars developing new tools for
battling spam, and a new federal anti-spam law went into effect on Jan. 1.
So are our e-mail inboxes any less cluttered?
In the week since the law took effect, spam-filtering company Brightmail
Inc. flagged 58 percent of incoming e-mail as spam, showing no change from
December. And America Online Inc. saw a 10 percent jump in spam from
overseas, possibly from spammers trying to evade U.S. law.
Some experts even believe the new law will actually bury us in even more
electronic junk.
"Now we have a green light for what would come to be called `legal spam,'"
said Vincent Schiavone, chief executive of the ePrivacy Group consultancy.
By establishing official guidelines for what's permissible, "the federal
law made unsolicited mail legal but no less unwanted."
Advances in filtering technology aren't eliminating spam, either, as
spammers quickly develop smarter countermeasures such as constantly
changing the wording in their messages.
As well, spammers have used computer viruses to create additional e-mail
relay points even as Internet service companies shut down previously
poisoned pathways.
Leslie Flynn, an administrative assistant for an investment banker,
continues to get ads for Xanex, Valium and "things to make parts of your
bodies bigger."
The new law doesn't actually ban pitches as long as senders meet various
guidelines - such as including an accurate subject line and the sender's
real-world mail address. Recipients must also be offered a way to decline,
or opt out of, future e-mailings.
The law's backers figure spammers aren't inclined to be so cooperative or
forthright, but neither will they want to face up to five years
imprisonment.
"A spammer will see that and say, `Yikes, I'm going to move to another line
of business," said Trevor Hughes of the Email Service Provider Coalition,
whose members send newsletters and other bulk mailings they deem
legitimate.
But notably, many marketers support the law, particularly its nullification
of some conflicting state statutes and, in California's case, tougher
measures that would have required a recipient's permission before sending
commercial e-mail.
"Everyone was planning for this California law, which was so draconian,"
said Ira Rothken, a San Rafael, Calif., lawyer who has defended companies
accused of spamming. "Once the federal government passed the federal law,
everyone was kind of relieved."
He said many marketers who had, because of the California law, planned on
scaling back on e-mailings sent on their behalf by freelancers were no
longer curtailing the mailing.
"Basically it's a bill of rights for companies that want to send junk
e-mail," said John Levine, a board member of the Coalition Against
Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail.
Several marketers insist they'll adhere to stronger guidelines and only
ship missives to people who have requested mailings.
"From a marketer's perspective, you have to think of the long term," said
Michael Sippey of Quris Inc., which handles e-mail for Charles Schwab
Corp., Blockbuster Inc. and others. He said marketers won't want to forever
lose potential customers who get annoyed and opt out.
Nonetheless, Sippey agreed that the law won't stop spammers from simply
moving offshore or further trying to hide their tracks - even if doing so
is now illegal.
Some critics of the law point to technology as the solution, though
techniques developed so far have failed.
Jonathan Spira, whose Basex Inc. analysis firm declared spam the "Product
of the Year" for 2003, said spammers have an edge because they merely have
to outsmart machines. By contrast, those building the machines have to not
only outsmart spammers, they also must avoid blocking legitimate mail.
"We don't have the solution yet. We have the big Band-Aids," said Spira.
Levine heads a new working group to explore fundamental changes in the
e-mail architecture and plans to begin tests as soon as February.
Researchers at Microsoft Corp. and elsewhere are studying whether to
require small payments to send e-mail, costs that would be prohibitive for
spammers who send millions of messages.
IronPort Systems Inc., Yahoo Inc. and the Email Service Provider Coalition
have explored ways to authenticate trusted senders so that newsletters and
other legitimate mailings get through, allowing more aggressive filtering
to spurn the unwanted.
Cloudmark Inc., meanwhile, has created a network of individuals who
collectively identify spam and legitimate mailings, improving filtering
accuracy, while Privacy Inc. will soon offer a variation on disposable
e-mail addresses - aliases you can control to, say, restrict Amazon.com
mailings to one a month.
But ultimately, the solution may involve neither law nor technology.
Mary Youngblood, abuse team manager at EarthLink Inc., said people need to
be more savvy in using e-mail.
Among her tips: Put numbers in the middle of e-mail addresses to make them
harder to guess, and use a separate address for online shopping and
newsgroup postings.
Judge Orders End of Spam by Indian Firm
In a landmark judgment, a court on Tuesday ordered an Indian company to
stop jamming an Internet service by sending junk e-mails, or spam, a news
report said.
Judge R.C. Chopra ordered McCoy Infosystems Private Ltd. to stop
transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail to any user of the
state-owned Internet services provider, VSN Limited, the Press Trust of
India news agency said.
The court in New Delhi was ruling on a lawsuit filed by a major Indian
telecommunications firm, Tata Sons Ltd. and its subsidiary, Panatone
Finwest Ltd., which own a large stake in VSNL.
Tata Sons alleged in the lawsuit that McCoy Infosystems was intentionally
"trespassing" on VSNL's property by sending vast amounts of spam to its
service users.
"This is the first court order in the country on spamming," PTI quoted
Pravin Anand, Tata Sons' attorney, as saying after the verdict.
Since existing laws don't address recent technological advances such as
spam, the company had turned to older laws referring to trespass of goods
and nuisance laws to counter the menace of junk e-mails, Anand said.
Tata Sons' attorneys told the court that the McCoy Infosystems' "continued
action had severely degraded VSNL's capacity to function effectively," PTI
said.
The junk e-mails had led to slower server speeds and longer response times,
Anand said.
By sending unsolicited bulk e-mails, McCoy Infosystems was breaching the
privacy of VSNL and their subscribers, Anand was quoted as saying.
Spam Now Accounts for Nearly Two-thirds of All Emails
Spam accounted for nearly two-thirds of all email traffic in December, a
record high, US-British filter firm MessageLabs warned.
"The figures are that 62.7 percent of the mail we filtered globally last
month was spam," the company's chief technical officer, Mark Sunner, said
Wednesday in an interview with AFP from Britain.
"These growth rates are very, very dramatic."
In November, spam accounted for 55 percent of all monitored emails, and in
October it was 51 percent, he said.
Filter companies are hired by corporations to do the chore of weeding out
potential spam before emails reach their inbox.
MessageLabs filters 30 million emails a day for 7,500 corporate clients,
Sunner said.
He added that a "slightly higher" percentage of spam had been expected
ahead of Christmas as spammers pitched festive deals, but the actual figure
turned out to be much greater than expected.
In January 2003, spam accounted for only 10 percent of all emails. By April
2004, according to Sunner, the figure will be "around 70 percent."
He attributed the increase partly to the ineffectiveness of new anti-spam
laws in the United States, the biggest geographical source of unsollicited
emails, but also to "viral techniques" in which spammers hijacked computers
to boost distribution and remain anonymous.
Spam is not just widely considered to be irritating or offensive.
It also carries a spiralling economic cost, because firms have to boost
computer processing power and storage to cope with the rising tide and
employees have to spend time deleting unwanted mail.
PayPal Scam Spreads Mimail Worm
After releasing a new version of the Mimail e-mail worm last week, virus
authors are using a new tool to help it spread: spam e-mail containing a
Trojan horse program that, once installed, retrieves and installs the worm.
The new threat, which targets customers of EBay's PayPal online payment
service, highlights a growing trend in which online criminals combine
computer viruses, spam distribution techniques, Trojan horse programs, and
"phishing" scams to circumvent security technology and fool Internet users,
says Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos in Abingdon, England.
Antivirus companies including Sophos and Kaspersky Labs warned customers
Thursday about the new threat, which arrives in e-mail in-boxes as a
message purporting to come from online payment service PayPal.
The message subject line is "PAYPAL.COM NEW YEAR OFFER" and it reads, in
part: "for a limited time only PayPal is offering to add 10 percent of the
total balance in your PayPal account to your account and all you have to
do is register yourself within the next five business days with our
application (see attachment)!"
For their computers to be infected, users who open the compressed Zip file
attached to the e-mail must then open a second file, which installs a
Trojan horse program. That program connects to a Web site in Russia and
retrieves the latest version of the Mimail worm, Mimail-N, Theriault says.
Once installed, Mimail-N alters the configuration of Microsoft Windows so
that the worm is launched whenever Windows starts, harvests e-mail
addresses from the computer's hard drive, and mails copies of itself out
to those addresses. It also creates phony PayPal Web pages used to prompt
the user to enter credit card numbers and other personal information,
according to an alert issued by Kaspersky Labs.
Information that is harvested is sent to the same Russian Internet site
from which the Mimail worm was retrieved, Theriault says.
The strategy of using a Trojan program to retrieve the new virus is
unorthodox, and may be intended to circumvent antivirus products that have
already been updated to spot the new versions of Mimail, she says.
Trojan horse programs cannot spread on their own, like e-mail or Internet
worms, but they do provide a new way to infiltrate a computer on a network
that is using antivirus protection at the e-mail gateway. If the antivirus
product has not been updated to detect the new Trojan program, e-mail
messages containing it can slip by those defenses and be opened by users,
she says.
The biggest impact of the new worm will be on home Internet users who have
not installed desktop antivirus or firewall products, she says.
Even if users end up falling for the ruse, organizations that use firewalls
and desktop antivirus products should be able to spot the Trojan program
once it is installed on the desktop or prevent it from connecting to the
outside server and retrieving a copy of the Mimail worm, she says.
Intel, IBM Backing New Fund to Defend Linux Users
Two of the largest backers of Linux, the fast-growing operating system
popular with businesses, are contributing to a new fund that will defend
Linux users against copyright infringement lawsuits threatened by SCO Group
Inc.
An industry group formed to promote Linux - an operating system that
provides an alternative to Unix and to Microsoft's dominant Windows
software - said on Monday it has formed a "Linux legal defense fund" and
that the No. 1 computer company and No.1 semiconductor company have agreed
to help fund it.
International Business Machines Corp., which has adopted Linux as a
competitive tool to sell more hardware and services, and Intel Corp., which
makes the chips that Linux runs on, are contributing to the fund, although
they haven't specified how much.
Open Source Development Labs, or OSDL, a nonprofit industry consortium
based in Beaverton, Oregon, that is working to promote further adoption of
Linux, said in a statement on Monday that it created the fund, which so far
has attracted pledges of $3 million. OSDL said it is aiming for $10
million.
Linux, a variant of the widely used Unix operating system which can be
copied and modified freely, emerged a decade ago and is being used to run
the Internet, handle financial transactions and even manage the U.S.
nuclear arsenal.
"The threats from SCO were becoming louder and more frequent that they are
going to sue an end user," Stuart Cohen, chief executive of OSDL, told
Reuters. "We don't want the Linux community to have this cloud over their
head ... or to see the momentum or deployment of Linux slowed down."
Concerns over the legality of Linux were raised last year after SCO, which
came to own the rights to Unix, sued IBM for billions of dollars. SCO also
warned companies that they must pay to use Linux or face litigation.
IBM, which won't be tapping into the defense fund for its own legal
battles, was accused by SCO of embedding parts of SCO's Unix software code
in versions of the freely available Linux operating system.
IBM, which has an OSDL board seat, refuted the claims and counter-sued SCO,
saying that SCO had infringed on its patents and breached the general
public license for Linux.
"By refusing to give the basis of their claims, what they're doing is
preventing the Linux community from resolving any potential intellectual
property issues," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said.
Intel, also an OSDL member with a board seat, has also been one of the
biggest beneficiaries of the Linux, since the software is designed to run
primarily on its chips. Intel became the world's largest semiconductor
company by selling chips for personal computers running Microsoft Corp.'s
software, and the Linux operating system is proving to be a formidable
competitor to Microsoft.
"If they (OSDL) feel strong in their legal defense then they should set up
to indemnify end-users," SCO chief executive Darl McBride told Reuters.
McBride said SCO would make good on its threat to sue a "large Linux end
user" within a month, adding "I think it's time to face this thing head
on."
Other Linux advocates, including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Red Hat Inc., have
also taken similar measures to protect themselves and their customers
against lawsuits.
Judge Upholds $521 Million Verdict Against Microsoft
A federal judge upheld a $521 million verdict against Microsoft Corp. this
week, saying jurors were correct in determining that the world's largest
software maker infringed on patents held by others for its Internet
Explorer browser, according to court documents.
Microsoft, which had been arguing for a new trial, said it would
immediately appeal the verdict.
Judge James Zagel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of
Illinois denied Microsoft's request for a new trial in its patent case with
the University of California and Eolas Technologies Inc., which jointly
hold a key Web browsing technology patent.
"This motion rehearses a series of arguments that failed the first time
around," Zagel said, who said he made decision despite being uncomfortable
with the amount of the initial verdict.
The suit, originally brought against the world's largest software maker in
1999 by Eolas Technologies, which was founded by University of California
professor Michael Doyle, charged that Microsoft had used Eolas' patented
Web browser technology which allows other mini-applications to work with
Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.
"We're pleased that the judgment has been entered," said Martin Lueck, who
heads the business litigation group at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP
that represented Eolas.
"We believe on the merits that we're correct, and certainly so far that's
proved to be true," Lueck said, adding that he expected the appeal process
to last a year.
Judge Zagel also barred Microsoft from distributing versions of Internet
Explorer containing the disputed technologies, but put that injunction on
hold until Microsoft's appeal is over.
"Today's ruling simply finalizes a verdict already reached last summer,"
Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said from a prepared statement, adding
that Microsoft will appeal.
"We feel good about our prospects on appeal, remain steadfast in our belief
that the Eolas patent is not valid...," Drake said.
Microsoft believes that the Eolas patent will eventually be invalidated,
either through further trials or by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,
which is reviewing U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906, granted in 1998.
Judge Zagel also ordered Microsoft to prepay $45.3 million while
Microsoft's appeal runs its course.
Yahoo Emerges From Dot-Com Gloom
They're cheering again at Yahoo! Inc. The dot-com bellwether has recovered
$21 billion in shareholder wealth by astutely anticipating the habits of
Web surfers - so much so, in fact, that it now outranks MSN and America
Online as the Internet's top destination.
After a mortifying two-year slump, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company made
a $238 million profit in 2003, impressing disillusioned investors who had
written off Yahoo as another dot-com has-been.
Rave reviews are pouring in for chief executive Terry Semel, the former
head of Warner Bros. who came to the rescue in May 2001.
"It's been a very exciting trip because the results have been so great,"
said Semel, who still spends weekends at his southern California home.
Yahoo's comeback represents another hopeful sign for the high-tech
industry. As more people get high-speed Internet connections in their homes
and invest in portable devices to stay online, tech leaders like Intel
Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. also are reporting higher profits.
After deteriorating from a 2000 high of $237.50 to a 2001 low of $8.02,
Yahoo's stock price has tripled since the end of 2002, reaching $48 in
mid-January. Semel himself realized a $25.7 million windfall by exercising
1 million Yahoo stock options last year.
The company's Web sites emerged as the most popular Internet destinations
the last two months, surpassing Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Time Warner
Inc.'s AOL for the first time, according to comScore Networks, which tracks
Web use. Yahoo had 111 million unique visitors in December.
Yahoo has thrived while Microsoft has directed much of its attention at
luring traffic from AOL, said industry analyst Rob Enderle. But that could
quickly change if MSN, AOL or another major Web site targets Yahoo.
While MSN and AOL can count on built-in traffic from the subscribers who
also pay them for Internet connections, Yahoo has relatively few financial
ties to its audience.
"If someone really takes aim and decides to try to hit Yahoo, they could
lose a lot of people before they even knew it was happening," Enderle
said.
The threat doesn't appear to worry Wall Street.
Analysts expect Yahoo's profits to rise nearly 50 percent this year - a
target the company can't afford to miss, with its stock carrying a lofty
price-to-earnings ratio of 89. That multiple is minuscule, though, compared
to the company's p/e ratio of nearly 2,000 before the bubble burst in late
2000.
There is one striking similarity to those frothy days: Almost everyone
seems convinced Yahoo is poised for years of robust growth as the Internet
increasingly becomes ingrained in people's lives and more homes get
broadband connections to make the medium even more useful.
Yahoo "is a company in the right place at the right time," said analyst
Imran Khan of Fulcrum Global Partners.
Much of Yahoo's success reflects a turnaround in Internet advertising,
which fell from a $7.6 billion market in 2000 to $6.2 billion in 2002 and
rebounded to $6.8 billion last year, according to figures gathered by
Fulcrum. It expects online advertising to soar as high as $8.1 billion
this year.
Yahoo's ad revenue has grown substantially since it paid $1.8 billion to
acquire Overture Services, a marketing vehicle that charges Web sites to
display their links alongside related search engine results.
Other acquisitions in Semel's $2.5 billion buying spree included the online
help-wanted site HotJobs and search engine provider Inktomi.
With a soft-spoken manner and no previous Internet experience, the
60-year-old Semel didn't seem like a logical choice to run Yahoo, a
fun-loving company filled with brash, tech-savvy workers who weren't even
born when he first became a Hollywood executive in 1972.
When Semel was brought into replace Tim Koogle, who had led the company
almost since its inception, it was such an uncomfortable fit that many
analysts thought Yahoo hired Semel simply to tap into his Hollywood
connections so the company could be sold to a media giant.
But Semel surprised the skeptics, including many of Yahoo's own employees
who wondered what the new CEO had in mind as he quietly studied the company
for months after his arrival. As Semel ruminated, Yahoo was on its way to a
$92.8 million loss that led to 800 layoffs, half of them on Semel's watch.
Once he grasped Yahoo's strengths and weaknesses, Semel oversaw a
methodical makeover that has imposed more discipline on the company,
replacing the New Economy's iconoclasm with old-school capitalism.
In its early years, Yahoo's spontaneous approach produced a haphazard mix
of popular innovations and experimental features that never made money.
Today, Yahoo carefully measures just about everything it does in terms of
revenue per user and revenue per employee.
The focus has paid off - Yahoo generates $375,000 in revenue per employee,
up from $221,000 at the end of 2001 when Yahoo's payroll had shrunk to
3,000 workers. Yahoo now has 5,500 employees.
The company's monthly revenue per user now stands at 67 cents, up from 35
cents at the end of 2001.
Semel also expanded Yahoo's subscription base from 200,000 when he arrived
to 4.9 million last year.
Many of the new subscribers have been picked up through a partnership with
SBC Communications Inc. to sell high-speed Internet connections,
positioning Yahoo to sell audio and video subscriptions. Yahoo visitors
already pay fees for features such as extra e-mail storage and its popular
matchmaking service.
Semel thinks Yahoo may have more than 7.5 million subscribers by year's
end, using a strategy some analysts liken to an amusement theme park that
constantly finds new ways to encourage visitors to spend money once inside
the gates.
By taking over Inktomi as well as the online search engine AltaVista as
part of the Overture acquisition, Yahoo gained the leverage it needed to
cut ties by April with its former ally turned rival Google Inc.
Yahoo's early $10 million investment in Google is likely to be worth
hundreds of millions if, as expected, the online search leader goes public
this year. Semel says he hasn't decided if Yahoo will sell the stock to
help finance its own future expansion.
"I haven't given much thought to Google's IPO," he said. "We've been too
busy taking advantage of all our opportunities around here."
Microsoft Extends Windows 98 Support
Just days before it was to end support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second
Edition, Microsoft has decided to extend the life of the products until
June 30, 2006.
The Redmond, Washington-based software vendor also extended support for
Windows Millennium Edition, which was set to end December 31, 2004, until
June 30, 2006, it says in a statement Monday.
Microsoft was planning to end support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second
Edition on January 16. This means that telephone support would no longer
be available and Microsoft would stop releasing security updates for the
operating system products. Microsoft told users to upgrade to a newer
operating system if they still wanted support.
Microsoft has now reversed its decision in response to customers' needs and
to bring Windows 98 SE in line with its updated product lifecycle policy,
the company says. Microsoft has changed its product lifecycle policy to
provide support for seven years instead of the original four, it says.
Despite the availability of Windows XP since late 2001, Windows 98 and
Windows 98 SE, which came to market in June 1998 and June 1999,
respectively, are still widely used.
Research firm IDC estimates that over 58 million copies of Windows 98 were
installed worldwide at the end of 2003, says Dan Kusnetzky, vice president
of systems software research at IDC.
AssetMetrix, an Ottawa-based IT asset analysis tool vendor, late last year
collected data on over 370,000 PCs from 670 businesses in the U.S. and
Canada. It found that 80 percent of those companies have at least one PC
running either Windows 95 or Windows 98. The older operating systems
accounted for about 27 percent of operating systems found.
German Police Investigate Potato Computer Scam
German police are investigating after an angry man returned a computer he
had just bought saying it was packed with small potatoes instead of
computer parts.
The store replaced the computer free of charge but became suspicious when
he returned a short time later with another potato-filled computer casing,
police in the western city of Kaiserslautern said on Monday.
"The second time he said he didn't need a computer any more and asked for
his money back in cash," a police spokesman said.
Police are now investigating the man for fraud.
Innocent Web Sites Shut Down
The Web site for the Sheshequin-Ulster Community Center in Pennsylvania
contains skating party news, calls for volunteers and minutes of board
meetings-but no pornography. Nonetheless, the site was one of scores of
sites that had the misfortune of sharing IP addresses with child
pornography sites targeted by the state of Pennsylvania and was shut down
last summer.
The center's ISP is among more than a dozen ISPs in Pennsylvania that have
been issued informal notices from the Office of the Attorney General to
block Web sites. The censorship stems from a state statute in 2000 that was
enacted to combat child pornography but, according to civil rights
advocates, inadvertently suppresses protected speech by blocking hundreds
of thousands of innocent sites.
Last week, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the American Civil
Liberties Union of Pennsylvania argued before the U.S. District Court of
the Eastern District of Pennsylvania that the law violates the First and
14th Amendments as well as the Interstate Commerce Clause.
The Webmaster at the Sheshequin-Ulster Community Center, Laura Blain, did
not know that her site was blocked until a county supervisor complained
about not being able to locate information, Blain said.
When Blain called her ISP, she was told her site was "caught up in
something they couldn't divulge," Blain said.
Lack of notice to the site owner is at the center of the complaint brought
by the CDT and ACLU. The organizations argue that content owners' due
process is violated by a process that involves the ISPs alone.
Additionally, since the law went into effect, the attorney general has
issued more than 450 informal notices to ISPs, resulting in blocked Web
sites, and one formal court order. The attorney general's office maintains
that ISPs sought the informal process.
"When this law was passed, we sat down with a number of ISPs to discuss
ways to implement it, and the ISPs asked our office to create this informal
notification process rather than go to court," said Sean Connolly,
spokesman for the acting attorney general.
Pennsylvania concedes that blocking IP addresses can cause "collateral
restriction" of some protected speech, but it argues that ISPs can use
different means-such as URL filtering-to prevent overblocking.
Berners-Lee Is Knighted
The Queen of England this month named Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the
World Wide Web, a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire, in honor
of his contributions to the development of the Internet.
The British computer scientist and Oxford graduate holds the 3Com Founders
chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
at MIT, and he is director of the World Wide Web Consortium.
Berners-Lee invented the initial specifications for URLs, HTTP and HTML
while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote
the first Web browser and server software in 1990.
Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study
The typical Internet user - far from being a geek - shuns television and
actively socializes with friends, a study on surfing habits said Wednesday.
The findings of the first World Internet Project report present an image of
the average Netizen that contrasts with the stereotype of the loner "geek"
who spends hours of his free time on the Internet and rarely engages with
the real world.
Instead, the typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends
more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And,
television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five
hours per week compared with Net abstainers, the study added.
"Use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while
having little impact on positive aspects of social life," said Jeffrey
Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the California
university that organized the project.
"Most Internet users generally trust the information they find online," he
told Reuters via e-mail.
The findings are derived from surveys of Internet and non-Internet users
in 14 countries: the United States, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Italy,
Spain, Sweden, Japan, Macao, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China and
Chile.
The study does however support some long-established Internet usage trends
including the fact that the wealthiest segments of the population are the
most avid users and that more men than women surf the Web. But figures vary
widely by country.
For example, the gender gap is most pronounced in Italy and smallest in
Taiwan. According to the study, 41.7 percent of Italian men are online
compared to 21.5 percent of Italian women. In Taiwan, the difference is
25.1 percent for men and 23.5 percent for women.
The digital divide, a phrase used to describe how poverty impacts Web
usage, appears to be tightening around the world, Cole said.
In seven of the 12 countries for which the information was available, more
than 20 percent of the poorest segment of the population uses the Internet.
Sweden, Korea and the U.S. have the highest usage of Internet users among
the poor.
The credibility of information published on the Internet also received a
surprising boost.
Despite the existence of countless spoof Web sites and message boards that
carry oddball political rants, more than half of Internet users surveyed
said "most or all" of the information they find online is reliable and
credible.
The most trusting users are in South Korea while Swedes are the biggest
skeptics about the veracity of Web news.
The Chinese, meanwhile, are among the most active Net socialisers.
According to the study, Chinese Internet users say they rely on the medium
to interact with others who share their political interests, hobbies and
faith.
"It's more than in any other country and a significant figure for citizens
of a nation in which religion is officially banned," the study said of
Chinese users' willingness to discuss religion online with others.
=~=~=~=
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