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May 1, 2003
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Spam Invasion: Your Cell Phone
Get-rich-quick schemes, explicit pornography, urgent appeals for help from Nigerian colonels. Coming soon to a cell phone near you?
The bulk spam that now accounts for as much as three-quarters of all e-mail traffic could soon insinuate its way into movie theaters, subways and anywhere else Americans take their cell phones, experts said at a forum on spam on Thursday.
Text-messaging services on newer cell phones could enable spammers to reach a tempting new audience, conference panelists said.
Federal law prohibits most telemarketers from dialing cell phones, but no such regulations prevent spammers from sending messages to addresses like 2025551212@cellphonecarrier.com. Because many text services carry a per-message charge, costs to consumers could mount quickly.
Text messaging has yet to catch on widely in the United States, since carriers until recently had not agreed on an industry-wide standard. One out of five cell-phone customers now pay between $3 and $20 per month for the feature, but others may be reluctant to sign up if wireless spam becomes common, phone-company officials said.
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Rocket-powered sled breaks 1982 world land speed record
A rocket-powered sled shot down a 3-mile straightaway in about six seconds to break a world record that had stood for two decades.
The monorail sled set the land speed mark for rail vehicles early Wednesday at the Holloman High Speed Test Track, testing a 192-pound bullet-shaped payload being developed by the 846th Test Squadron and the Missile Defense Agency.
The test, in a remote area of the base, started with a brilliant, multihued blaze of rocket engines and ended in a spray of sparks when a missile carried by the sled slammed into an immobile target. There was silence until a split second before the end, when earsplitting bursts rolled across the desert floor.
"Psychologically, you think it's over. But then comes the sonic boom. I know it's coming. But I always jump a little," said Lt. Col. Russ Kurtz, director of operations.
Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 -- almost nine times the speed of sound -- or about 6,400 mph, said Lt. Col. James Jolliffe, 846th Test Squadron commander. The previous record was Mach 8, or 6,122 mph, set on Oct. 5, 1982, also at Holloman.
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Computers to Africa scheme criticised
The practice of supplying second-hand computers to Africa can prove to be an expensive mistake, according to a UK report.
The UK Centre of International Education has said that Western organisations trying to bridge the "digital divide" are having some unfortunate consequences for teaching.
It says that software compatibility problems are leading to chaos in some classrooms as teachers battle to make the machines work - claims backed up by some organisations in Africa themselves
"It has been a very very costly mistake," Bildad Kagai from the Open Source Foundation for Africa told the BBC World Service's Outlook programme.
"The issue is that we did not consider the consequent costs that come with the donation of computers."
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IBM denies charges of Unix theft
IBM has denied SCO Group's allegations that it misappropriated Unix trade secrets, but Big Blue isn't giving hints about what its eventual strategy will be for battling the lawsuit.
In an 18-page filing in U.S. District Court in Utah, IBM said SCO Group's four formal charges are unfounded, denied the truth of dozens of SCO allegations, and accused SCO of trying to slow the work of the open-source community.
SCO sued IBM in March, alleging that Big Blue had misappropriated SCO's Unix trade secrets by moving them into the open-source Linux operating system. SCO Group, a Lindon, Utah-based company still in the process of changing its name from Caldera International, is the inheritor of the Unix intellectual property initially developed at AT&T.
"While IBM has endeavored to support the open-source community and to further the development of Linux, IBM has not engaged in any wrongdoing," Big Blue said in its response, filed Wednesday. "Contrary to Caldera's unsupported assertions, IBM has not misappropriated any trade secrets; it has not engaged in unfair competition; it has not interfered with Caldera's contracts; and it has not breached contractual obligations to Caldera."
IBM also accused SCO of trying, in the suit, to interfere with the open-source community, which develops Linux and many other software packages. SCO is seeking "to hold up the open-source community (and development of Linux in particular) by improperly seeking to assert proprietary rights over important, widely used technology and impeding the use of that technology by the open-source community," IBM said.
But IBM's strategy for battling the lawsuit, which seeks more than $1 billion, doesn't make an appearance in Big Blue's filing.
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Are blacklists killing more than spam?
Spam has become such a vexing problem that, if current trends continue, e-mail could become a far less useful way to communicate.
But have some of the muscular responses to unsolicited bulk e-mail, such as blacklists that target Internet providers used by spammers, created problems of their own?
On Thursday, participants at a three-day spam summit convened by the Federal Trade Commission sparred over whether such blacklists are legal and whether they do more harm than good. Some speakers warned their use means that legitimate e-mail is often lost or silently discarded--becoming an accidental casualty in the war on spam.
Margie Arbon of the Mail Abuse Prevention System defended the practice of blacklisting, in which activists create and publish a list of Internet addresses that are linked with spammers. Internet service providers and individuals can subscribe to the list and use it to discard messages that originate from addresses on it.
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Gear makers rally behind Wi-Fi security
Wi-Fi gear makers are lining up to lend support to a new security standard, as they try to allay concerns about transmitting data over wireless networks.
Earlier this week, an industry group called the Wi-Fi Alliance announced the certification of products using the latest security specification, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). The lack of a security standard has been one of the chief obstacles in the adoption of wireless networking technology within the business market.
WPA is the third specification related to Wi-Fi to receive certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance for interoperability, which means that approved products are supposed to work with each other no matter which company manufactured the product.
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Cisco enables Internet wiretaps
Addressing a major concern of law enforcement, Cisco Systems has developed a way for police to listen in on Internet-based phone calls without detection.
The world's largest maker of networking equipment is testing surveillance products in its labs and making the service available to customers on request, spokesman Jim Brady said.
He said Cisco has also built the capabilities into a "limited number" of its products, though none of them have yet been purchased.
Cisco developed the "Lawful Intercept Control" service in response to requests from corporate customers, including Internet service providers — but did not work with the government in developing the standard over the past eight months, Brady said.
The San Jose-based company submitted a 37-page proposal on its surveillance service to the Internet Engineering Task Force on March 30. The standards organization is accepting comments for six months.
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Gear makers rally behind Wi-Fi security
Wi-Fi gear makers are lining up to lend support to a new security standard, as they try to allay concerns about transmitting data over wireless networks.
Earlier this week, an industry group called the Wi-Fi Alliance announced the certification of products using the latest security specification, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). The lack of a security standard has been one of the chief obstacles in the adoption of wireless networking technology within the business market.
WPA is the third specification related to Wi-Fi to receive certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance for interoperability, which means that approved products are supposed to work with each other no matter which company manufactured the product.
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FCC Seeks More Data on Digital TV Rollout
The Federal Communications Commission will seek more information from television broadcasters, cable operators and electronics manufacturers about their efforts to speed the transition to digital signals, according to a letter released on Thursday.
The agency plans to ask how broadcasters are using a swath of airwaves they were given to air digital programming, on what cable systems digital signals are being carried, and what more needs to be done to ensure television sets can receive the digital signals.
The requests for information will help "assess the impact of past policy initiatives and to inform our future efforts in this area," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said in an April 29 letter to the U.S. Congress released on Thursday.
About a year ago Powell proposed a series of steps to kick start the transition to digital signals by broadcast television stations because the move had become bogged down over what steps should be taken first and by whom.
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US-Russian Team Leaves Space Station Saturday
A U.S.-Russian space team is leaving the international space station Saturday after five months, now that their relief crew has arrived. What makes their departure different from that of the five previous teams is that they are heading home on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. U.S. space shuttles, the usual mode of transportation to and from the outpost, have been grounded because of the Columbia accident in February. The Soyuz is a proven craft, although not as comfortable.
Because of the Columbia disaster, station commander Ken Bowersox, astronaut Don Pettit, and cosmonaut Nikolai Budharin are returning to Earth more than a month later than originally planned. When the shuttle disintegrated in February, they told the U.S. space agency NASA that they would remain aloft as long as necessary. Commander Bowersox sounds as if he regrets having to leave.
"I'm actually going to miss the station quite a lot. I feel a little bit like I'm being kicked out of my apartment for not paying my rent," he said.
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Code red for open source?
Lines from Unix's source code have been copied into the heart of Linux, sometimes exactly and sometimes in a modified form designed to disguise their origin, SCO Group Chief Executive Darl McBride said Thursday.
McBride's accusation cuts to the heart of the open-source movement's legal and philosophical underpinnings.
As part of its billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM, which charges that Big Blue misappropriated SCO's Unix trade secrets and built them into Linux, SCO hired several consultants to compare the source codes of the two operating systems.
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