Older News

How the "ILOVEYOU" Worm Works
5 4 2000 Wired News

The "Love Bug" worm, like most destructive programs, isn't exactly cutting-edge code-writing, but it's still deadly, technically speaking.

The worm invades computers and servers via email attachments when using Microsoft Outlook, as well as via Internet Relay Chat.

Cybercrime Solution Has Bugs
5 3 2000 Wired News

U.S. and European police agencies will receive new powers to investigate and prosecute computer crimes, according to a preliminary draft of a treaty being circulated among over 40 nations.

The Council of Europe's 65KB proposal is designed to aid police in investigations of online miscreants in cases where attacks or intrusions cross national borders.

Brits Launch Online Spy Network
5 2 2000 Wired News

A few weeks back, Russia's secret service agency raised privacy watchdogs' hackles when it admitted it could intercept and monitor all Russian Internet traffic.

Playboy vs Penthouse
5 2 2000 Wired News

In today's buck-wild world of Internet porn, where every urge and fetish known to man -- and some beasts -- has its own url, old-school print publications like Playboy, and even its raunchier rival, Penthouse, can seem as quaint as a Norman Rockwell painting.

Infamous computer hacker Kevin Mitnick ordered off lecture circuit
4 28 2000 CNN.com

Kevin Mitnick, the notorious computer hacker accused of causing millions of dollars in damage to technology companies, has been ordered to get off the lecture circuit or risk going back to prison.

Fishing For Smut
4 27 2000 Salon.com

Beware the corporate internal review, especially if you're an employee of the Canadian government's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. One such survey, released last week, produced some startling news about the Internet habits of 10,000 department employees.

Macster PR 4 Released
4 22 2000

No new features, they're just getting caught up with Napster. :) You can chat with other users now, and you can look at other users entire mp3 libraries (instead of only being able to get mp3s from searches)

Apple profit: $233 million
4 20 2000 MacWeek

Apple Computer on Wednesday beat Wall Street estimates by reporting a second-quarter profit of $233 million, or $1.28 per share, on sales of $1.94 billion. Apple also announced that its board of directors has approved a two-for-one stock split pending a vote at Apple's annual shareholders meeting on Thursday.

DoS Attacks: Blame Canada
4 20 2000 Wired News

The U.S. Justice Department rejoiced Wednesday after a 15-year-old allegedly responsible for an attack on CNN.com was arrested in Canada. "It is in our estimation that Mafiaboy wasn't that good," said Sgt. Jean-Pierre Roy of the RCMP. "He wasn't what we could call a genius."

A little Net savvy is all you need to block satellite signals
4 20 2000 NewsScientist

SATELLITE signals critical to military operations can be jammed using cheap equipment from home improvement stores and electronics fairs, a US Air Force team has found. Instructions on how to build the jammers were found on the Internet.

Metallica Rips Napster
4 13 2000 Wired News

Heavy metal band Metallica has always been synonymous with music that is played fast and loud. After filing a lawsuit Thursday, the band might become more famous as the first group to strike a chord against music piracy on the Net.

ACLU's Filter Appeal Rejected
4 13 2000 Wired News

A federal judge in Boston has rejected the ACLU's request to reconsider his ruling in a case over the Cyber Patrol filtering software, setting the stage for a lengthy battle before an appeals court.

Gnutella ignites porn and pirate worries
4 13 2000 ZDNet

It could undermine the influence of every search engine and every Web portal. It’s the biggest thorn yet in the side of record companies worried about the spread of pirated music on the Net. And it’s the easiest way yet to trade pornography, even illegal child porn, over the Internet. For a piece of software that lived for less than 24 hours on its home page, Gnutella has created quite a stir.

This 'Virus' Is an Apparition
4 10 2000 Wired News

It takes guts to say "Jesus." And it takes a gullible Internet user to believe that simply opening an email bearing that subject header will wipe out a hard drive with the simple click of a mouse.

Napster Not At Home With Cable
4 7 2000 Wired News

Music delivered online may just be too much data for the Net to handle -- even in the much-ballyhooed broadband future. Just ask cable modem users in San Diego.

High-speed cable service provider Cox@Home San Diego this week told several hundred of its customers to stop running the music-exchange software Napster or lose their cable modem accounts.

Can hyperlinks be outlawed?
4 6 2000 Salon.com

In a fresh attack on DeCSS, a program that decrypts DVDs so people can play them on Linux-based operating systems, the Motion Picture Association of America filed a motion on Wednesday to prohibit 2600, the "hacker quarterly," from linking to other sites that post copies of the outlawed program.

ACLU Appeals Mattel Ruling
4 5 2000 Wired News

The American Civil Liberties Union announced Wednesday it is appealing a Boston judge's order, in a lawsuit brought by Mattel against the "cphack" authors, prohibiting the distribution of the program that reveals Cyber Patrol's blacklisted sites.

Court: Programming languages covered by First Amendment
4 4 2000 CNET.com

A federal appeals court today cleared the way for a law professor to post previously banned encryption software on the Internet, finding that computer code qualifies as speech protected by the First Amendment.

"ElectroHippies" to attack biotech firms
4 3 2000 MSNBC (bleah)

Major biotechnology firms Monsanto Co. and Aventis Co. S.A. will find themselves in the digital crosshairs starting this weekend. According to a spokesman for the Electrohippies, a group that plans Internet-based protests, the two companies will first be targeted with a straightforward e-mail write-in campaign. But by the end of the week, new denial-of-service software tools will be distributed and could be aimed at the Internet operations of both firms.

Napster -- friend or foe?
3 30 2000 Scott Rosenberg - Salon.com

Fans have already embraced new music-distribution technologies. Musicians can fight them or join them.

MacMan.Net

Other News Sites

Free Porn :)

Deity 2.1 Released
MacMan.Net
12 22 2000

Deity 2.1, my free porn program. Find a series of images, give Deity the base url, the number range, and the url extension, and it downloads all the images saving them to your hard drive.

Now works with ALL servers, even the "virtual" servers is had trouble with before. (because it sends "Host: www.hostname.com" in the header)

Checks to see what the http status code was, if it's 404 Not Found (or any other bad codes) it won't save the image to your hard drive.

Also sends referrer info, so it should work with 99% of all web servers.

Oh Yum: There's More Spam
Wired News
10 27 2000

An analysis of data from an e-mail filtering firm shows that more inboxes are being targeted with more junk than ever before.

According to research released Friday by San Francisco-based Brightmail Inc., the amount of junk e-mail sent to U.S. Internet service providers has approximately quintupled in the last year.

Kmart, Wal-Mart limit sales of violent games
Salon.com
9 7 2000

(Question from MacMan: Doesn't K-Mart also sell guns and crossbows? :)

Young people itching to wreak havoc with an Uzi on their Playstation will have to bring along a parent if they want to buy a violent video game from some major retailers.

Kmart announced Thursday it will refuse sale of mature-rated games to anyone under 17, using a barcode scanner that will prompt cashiers to ask for identification from young people.

After Kmart's news conference in Washington, Wal-Mart announced it would enact the same policy.

Does Lieberman 'Tipper' Scales?
Wired News
8 7 2000

There's no question that Senator Joseph Lieberman is a traditional liberal on many issues: He's pro-choice, loves gun control, and opposes Social Security privatization.

But when it comes to demanding federal action against sex and violence in videogames and on TV, Al Gore's new running mate is as strident as the most right-wing Republican.

For years, Lieberman (D-Conn.) has been Washington's most indefatigable proponent of slapping labels on nearly anything he finds personally offensive -- not to mention pressing for V-chips and denouncing the "destructive influence of the entertainment media."

In highly publicized campaigns, the Connecticut politician has linked arms with Book of Virtues author William Bennett to attack Hollywood: The duo tallied how many out-of-wedlock sexual references appeared on network broadcasts during "family hours" and successfully prodded computer-game makers to rate their software. They even pressured Time Warner into selling its Interscope rap label, which sold albums by Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre.

Anti-Porn Law Worth Another Look?
Wired News
8 3 2000

SAN JOSE, California -- Advances in technology and the further spread of pornography make COPA worth a second look, according to testimony given at hearings Thursday.

The Child Online Protection Act commission, created by the much-maligned law of the same name, heard testimony on filtering technologies and other alternatives for protecting young eyes from adult content on the Internet.

The COPA Commission has come under scrutiny because a preliminary injunction has put a hold on the law that also created the commission.

Free Speech Rights for Computer Code?
The New York Times
7 31 2000

It was perhaps the most arcane statement in all the hours of acronym-filled testimony, one that came on the last day of the six-day trial. But it may have been a turning point in an important battle over the limits of a new copyright law, a potential landmark case that ended its trial phase last week in Manhattan and now awaits a verdict by the judge.

Jobs Unveils the Mac Cube
Wired News
7 19 2000

Apple has a new small, sleek, and stackable "cube" desktop model that features removable innards and a G4 processor, which will be available exclusively at the Apple Store in early August.

The G4 Cube has a built-in Velocity Engine, allowing its 450 MHz G4 CPU to process over one billion calculations per second. It comes with 64 MB of high-performance RAM, 1MB of backside level 2 cache, a 20GB Ultra ATA/66 hard disk drive, DVD-ROM drive with DVD-Video playback, and the ATI RAGE 128 Pro graphics card with 16MB of graphics memory.

The Cube also features a new connectivity option, the Apple Desktop Connector (ADC) which combines power, video, and USB signals onto a single cable.

The Great Napster Hope
Brad King - Wired News
7 7 2000

Napster's legal dream team had a rather lengthy response to the recording industry's lawsuit, but the message could be boiled down into two words: Screw you.

In a brief filed in the U.S. District Court's Northern District of California, Napster's lawyers cited the First Amendment, the Audio Home Recording Act, and the 1984 Betamax case in their rebuttal to the recording industry's request for a motion to shut Napster down.

The documents also said that not only does Napster increase CD sales, but consumers also have a "fair use" right to the service.

"The use of the Napster service to sample a song is analogous to visiting a listening station or borrowing a CD from a friend, in order to decide whether to make a purchase," the lawyers from Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP and Fenwik & West LLP said in documents filed with the court.

McCain Renews Porn-Filter Push
Wired News
6 28 2000

Senator John McCain, who has spent the last few years trying to push blocking software on public libraries, has found a new way to cordon off Internet porn.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Republican and erstwhile presidential candidate successfully added a sex-filtering amendment to a spending bill being debated on the Senate floor.

McCain said the measure was necessary to protect American children from the "technological sophistication of online predators" and websites featuring sex, racism, anti-semitism, drug-making information, and bomb recipes.

The amendment includes the same language as the Childrens' Internet Protection Act, which McCain introduced in January 1999. It requires any library or school receiving federal "e-rate" funds to tell the FCC it has selected "a technology for its computers with Internet access in order to filter or block Internet access."

Even though McCain darkly warned of websites with a "coloring book of racist symbols" for children, his legislation only applies to sex sites, specifically "material that is obscene and child pornography."

Scenes From the Hacker's 'Hood
Wired News
6 27 2000

Watching hackers in the middle of a recent Internet attack drove one point home to security experts who listened in: These guys like to make it up as they go along.

"The impression that most people fail to get from regular attacks is how trivial they are," said Elias Levy, chief technology officer of SecurityFocus.com. "These people tend to choose their targets pretty much at random -- or whoever bothers them that day, or pisses them off."

Levy's conclusion came following the release of SecurityFocus.com's "Motives and Psychology of the Black-hat Community" -- an installment in an Internet security series of papers dubbed Know Your Enemy.

The latest paper is based on the work of the group's "Honeynet Project" -- a SecurityFocus.com team that set up a network of servers ("honeypots") intentionally made weak to lure hackers. As the hackers used the systems as launch pads for attacks on websites and servers elsewhere on the Internet, project members tuned in, then sat back to observe.

(Note from MacMan: there's a few paragraphs in this story in which Space Rogue writes about the report.)

Mitnick barred from e-zine
Reuters
6 25 2000

Kevin Mitnick, once the world's most notorious computer hacker and a man who has spent more than five years behind bars for his activities, has been barred from writing a column for a start-up e-business venture.

Mitnick will be in court on Monday to fight the ban, imposed by his probation officer, arguing that the judge who imposed the terms of his three-year probation following his release from prison in January, never meant them to be so sweeping.

Under the terms of probation imposed by U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, Mitnick, 36, is not allowed within a dotcom of a computer until January 2003. Neither can he use modems, software, cellular phones or anything else that could link him to the Internet.

In addition, he is not allowed to leave a seven-county area of Southern California and cannot consult and advise on computers or any computer-related or Internet-related matters.

Court Says Anti-Smut Law (COPA) Illegal
Wired News
6 22 2000

WASHINGTON -- A federal anti-smut law violates Internet free-speech rights, an appeals court ruled on Thursday.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld a lower court's decision against the Child Online Protection Act, saying in a strongly-worded opinion that the measure was so unconstitutionally broad it affected even non-pornographic websites.

"To avoid liability under COPA, affected Web publishers would either need to severely censor their publications or implement an age or credit card verification system whereby any material that might be deemed harmful by the most puritan of communities in any state is shielded behind such a verification system," a three-judge panel wrote in its decision.

"COPA essentially requires that every Web publisher subject to the statute abide by the most restrictive and conservative state's community standards in order to avoid criminal liability," they said.

The Clinton administration, which defended the law in court, can choose to appeal the loss to the Supreme Court or wait for a full trial before U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who in February 1999 barred the government from enforcing the criminal law. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest decision.

Love Manifesto
Courtney Love
6 14 2000

Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not
talking about Napster-type software.

I'm talking about major label recording contracts.

I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:

This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20
percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what
Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.

What happens to that million dollars?

They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They
pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.

That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.

That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.

Internet Satellites Going Cheap (G4's using a variation of Apple's AirPort)
Wired News
6 14 2000

A would-be space entrepreneur is proposing an ambitious network of Internet satellites made from off-the-shelf Macintoshes and a variation of Apple's Airport technology.

Dennis Wingo, founder and CEO of SkyCorp, a startup based in Hunstville, Alabama, is hoping to launch a constellation of satellites for accessing the Internet at high speed from almost anywhere on the globe.

If it gets off the ground, Wingos' network would rival systems planned by giant corporations like Hughes and Teledesic -- but at a fraction of the cost.

With help from NASA, Wingo plans to build 544 orbiting Web servers from Apple's G4 Power Macintosh computers and a souped-up version of the company's Airport wireless networking technology.

Swooping over the globe in low-Earth orbit, the satellites would be accessible from cell phones, computers fitted with inexpensive PC cards, or clip-on wireless modems for devices like Palm's handhelds.

As well as using off-the-shelf technology, Wingo hopes to save large sums of money by having the satellites flown into space in pieces and assembled by space station crews -- the satellites would not have to withstand the rigors of a space launch.

Music Bigwigs: Stop Napster Now (also mp3.com admits to being the RIAA's "bitch" :)
Reuters
6 13 2000

SAN FRANCISCO -- The record industry saught an injunction against Napster.com on Monday, saying it was depressing sales of compact discs near college campuses.

The motion for a preliminary injunction was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Music Publishers' Association.

The groups argued in their court filings that Napster Inc., a closely held song-swap software company, was responsible for widespread copyright infringements and industry harm.

They cited a study by the Field Research Corp. comprised of 2,555 college students who are Internet users, which showed a direct correlation between Napster use and decreased CD sales.

"(Nearly half) of Napster users ... described the nature of its impact on their music purchases in a way which ... explicitly indicated or suggested that Napster displaces CD sales," said the Field study.

Napster officials were not immediately available for comment.

Annual Piracy Figures Still Based on Imagination
macjournals.com
6 12 2000

The press release for this year's report makes the case very gravely. "Five Years: US$59.2 Billion Lost. Software Industry Suffers From Cumulative Impact of Global Software Piracy; Publisher Losses Total US$12.2 Billion in 1999." The details inside are just as grim. "The 1999 software piracy estimates indicate that more than one in every three business software applications in use during 1999 was pirated. Piracy losses for the U.S. and Canada lead every other region of the world at US$3.6 billion, or 26% of the total. The continuing problem means lost jobs, wages, tax revenues, and a potential barrier to success for software start-ups around the globe." US$975 million in lost revenue in Japan, US$165 million in both Poland and Russia, and on and on.

Small wonder the world's press gives this such attention. There's only one catch: the figures are pure imagination. The methodologies for the annual piracy survey are either masked with the labels "proprietary" and "confidential," or they're based on methods of estimating software sales that are so discredited that they've disappeared from the public discourse. The more you look at the anti-piracy survey, the less you see. Let us show you why.

the rest of the story

Web 'Pirates' Unearth Treasure: Hit Films
Washington Post
6 7 2000

"Most of the time, you can get stuff that hasn't left the theaters yet," says Steele, who's majoring in government and politics. "As soon as a new movie comes out, my friends will sit there [at the computer] and search for it instead of shelling out money to go see it."

Is Steele troubled that there are laws governing this sort of thing? Not really. "It's only technically stealing," he says. "Basically, I feel if movies weren't so expensive, there'd be no need to steal them."

Filters Kowtowing to Hate?
Wired News
5 27 2000

Blocking software, long criticized for mislabeling innocuous websites as pornographic, now has a new problem: accusations of double standards.

The most popular filtering programs allow their users to freely visit the websites of arch-conservative groups like Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America, which feature strident denunciations of homosexuality.

But when those identical fulminations against lesbians and gays were duplicated and placed on personal Web pages, Cyberpatrol, Surfwatch, and four other programs quickly added the addresses to their off-limits blacklists.

Amex Nixes X-Rated Exchanges
Wired News
5 26 2000

"At Suzee's Smut Shop Dot Com, you can see enough naked booty to make your libido boil over -- but bring your Visa, because Suzee'll take off all her clothes before your eyes, but she won't take American Express. In fact, no online smut site will take American Express."

OK, maybe Suzee's Smut Shop doesn't exist, and Visa advertisements for online porn don't, either.

But the last part is true: In a few weeks, no online porn site will take American Express. At least, American Express will no longer cover credit card transactions from porn sites.

Yahoo Blasts French Maneuver
Reuters
5 23 2000

PARIS -- Yahoo France said Tuesday a court ruling to stop the French from accessing online sales of Nazi memorabilia could set a dangerous precedent for Internet users worldwide.

The French subsidiary of Yahoo also warned that it was technically impossible to fully comply with the ruling and did not discount lodging an appeal.

In the first verdict of its kind in France, a Paris court accused Yahoo on Monday of offending "the collective memory of the country" by allowing Nazi souvenirs to be sold on one of the English-language sites it hosts.

Playboy Wins Cable Victory
Reuters
5 22 2000

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court handed Playboy Enterprises Inc. a major victory Monday, striking down a law that requires sexually explicit cable television channels to completely block their signals to non-subscribing households.

The high court, by a 5-4 vote, agreed with Playboy's arguments that the 1996 federal law was too broad and violated constitutional First Amendment free-speech rights.

The Justice Department strongly defended the law that requires cable operators who show adult programs to "scramble" or block the signals, or air the programs only late at night when children presumably will not be watching television.

I love you Courtney Love
Wired News
5 17 2000

If you book Courtney Love for a speaking engagement, you have to expect trouble.

That's what an astonished Digital Hollywood audience got when the rock star strode into the Puck Building in SoHo, accompanied by bodyguards and at least a dozen unruly paparazzi, who briefly shut down the proceedings by refusing to stop snapping pictures from three feet in front of her.

Once she cranked it up, Love was unruly herself -- defending Napster, deriding the record industry's Internet strategy, and putting down everybody from recording association President Hillary Rosen to Steve Case.

Napster Users Get the Boot
Wired News
5 10 2000

Napster on Wednesday blocked access to its software for hundreds of thousands of users the heavy-metal band Metallica claims is offering its music for illegal trade.

The move, affecting 317,377 people, may prompt future legal battles between the band and its fans.

"Napster has taken extraordinary steps to comply with Metallica's demands to block hundreds of thousands of its fans from using the Napster system. Napster has always stated that it would act in response to notice from copyright holders and it has lived up to that commitment in good faith," said Napster lawyer Laurence Pulgram.

Users who sign on to their Napster accounts receive a message saying they are being denied access to the file-sharing program because they have been accused of illegally swapping files. Those who have been blocked won't have an easy time regaining access to the service.

Napster's 'Safe Harbor' Sinks
Wired News
5 8 2000

The recording industry continues its roll of legal victories, as a federal judge on Friday rejected Napster's request for a summary judgment which would have dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America.

The RIAA filed a lawsuit against Napster on December 7 on the grounds that the Napster application had created a safe haven for Internet music piracy.

Napster's defense hinged on the "safe harbor" provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that states an ISP should not be held liable for illegal activity occurring on the site, said copyright attorney Whitney Broussard.

In Quebec, French-First Policy Riles Small Sites
New York Times
5 5 2000

With the overwhelming dominance of English on the Web, it's not surprising that language can be a sore spot in regions with other primary tongues. But while many officials around the world have tried to avoid language requirements in cyberspace, the Canadian province of Quebec has threatened court action against a small number of local businesses whose Web sites are not accessible to its French-speaking majority.

In the past few years, several Quebec-based companies have come under fire from the Office of the French Language for posting English-only Web sites.