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April 17, 2003
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FTC tries to shut down Porn spam e-mail operation
Federal regulators want to shut down a spam operation that allegedly used deceptive e-mail with bland subject lines like "new movie info" and "did you hear the news" to lure people to pornographic Web sites.
The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday that after receiving about 46,000 complaints it had asked a federal judge to halt the operation until there can be a trial. It is the first FTC case involving spam with deceptive subject lines, the agency said.
"When consumers opened the e-mail messages, they were immediately subjected to sexually explicit solicitations," the FTC said. "Because of the deceptive subject lines, consumers had no reason to expect to see such material."
Children may have been exposed to the pornographic e-mail, the agency said.
The FTC accused Brian D. Westby, of suburban St. Louis, of using the e-mail spam operation to drive business to an adult Web site called "Married But Lonely."
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Opteron prices reflect AMD confidence
The Opteron processors for midrange servers coming next week from Advanced Micro Devices will range in speed from 1.4GHz to 1.8GHz, said sources, and AMD is apparently not skimping on price.
The Opteron 240 will run at 1.4GHz and cost around $340 in volume quantities, said sources, while the Opteron 242 and 244 will run at, respectively, 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz and cost around $800 and $900. Prices could change, sources cautioned, and, historically, wide discrepancies have existed between AMD's posted price and the actual prices that the chips sell for.
While the chip speeds fall within the range of expectations, the pricing underscores the confidence AMD has in the chip's selling power and performance.
At $340, the Opteron 240 will likely compete in price against Intel's 2.8GHz Xeon chip for one- and two-processor servers, although it will run at a far lower clock speed. The 2.8GHz Xeon sells for $455 in volume. Intel's Xeon running at 2.6GHz, meanwhile, sells for $284 in volume quantities. The Opteron 242 and 244, meanwhile, cost more than any of the Xeons for single- or dual-processor workstations and servers. These chips, however, are less expensive than the Xeon chips for four- and eight-processor servers, which start at above $1,000.
Clock speed isn't everything when it comes to measuring performance. The Opteron chips will come with 1MB of cache, a performance-enhancing reservoir of memory located on the same chip as the processor. The low-cost Xeons come with 512KB of cache. The $1,000-plus models for four- and eight-processor systems come with 1MB of cache.
AMD declined to comment.
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Will Genetic Engineering Kill Us?
Bioethicists and scientists contemplating the future fear that genetic engineering and other technologies are going to divide human beings into classes that may one day try to destroy one another.
Rich, powerful people will use technology to make their kids smarter, they say. The poor and the disenfranchised, meanwhile, will become a kind of subhuman servant class, like the Yahoos in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
If humans create an offshoot of their own species, said evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, that act would represent a dramatic turning point in the evolution of homo sapiens.
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RSA to integrate identification products
RSA Security is planning to integrate its products into an identity management system that will be compliant with Liberty Alliance software--the main rival to Microsoft's Passport.
Announcing the strategy at the RSA Conference 2003 here, the company said current products will be brought piece by piece into its system called Nexus.
"It's an incremental change," said John Worral, product marketing manager at RSA. "We have interoperability. The next level is integration." The products will be tightly integrated, so they can be managed in one place. The upgrade will place Liberty-compliant technology at its core.
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Taiwanese memory makers gang up on Hynix
Four of the biggest Taiwanese memory manufacturers have decided to complain to the local authorities that Dramurai Hynix has breached trade rules and is unfairly subsidised by the Korean government.
As the US and Europe have both decided to give Hynix a good kicking over similar matters, what could be more appropriate than for Taiwan to join as well.
Nanya, Winbond, Powerchip and Mosel Vitelic have ganged up and will complain to the Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission, the Economic News reports today.
The EU and the US blocs both imposed swingeing import tariffs recently on Hynix, as a result of complaints from disinterested observers such as Micron and Infineon.
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Da Vinci: Father of Cryptography?
Ever looked at the Mona Lisa and wondered why he's got such a goofy grin?
Yes, we do mean he.
Evidently, Mona isn't quite the woman art historians thought she was. But only those who know the secret code can look at Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait and see the happy hermaphrodite that lurks within.
Dan Brown's latest novel, The Da Vinci Code, published by Doubleday Books, is about the famous Renaissance artist and the oblique references to the occult contained in his equally famous paintings. It's also about ancient secret societies, modern forensics, science and engineering, and the history of religion.
Most of all The Da Vinci Code is about the history of encryption -- the many methods developed over time to keep private information from prying eyes.
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Apple denies bid for Universal
Countering speculation that it is close to buying Vivendi Universal's record label, Apple Computer said Wednesday that it has never offered to make such an investment or purchase.
In a statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said there was no substance to comments by one of Vivendi's directors to Bloomberg News that Apple would make a bid for Universal Music Group.
"Apple has never made any offer to invest in or acquire a major music company. The press statements this morning attributed to Vivendi board member Claude Bebear are untrue, as Mr. Bebear has confirmed in a later report," Jobs said. "Beyond these comments, we will abide by Apple's policy of not commenting on rumors."
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Chip industry shakes off SARS
The potentially deadly SARS virus, which started in China, has sparked fear and led to a rush of preventive planning but has not yet disrupted a global semiconductor industry reliant on easy access to Asian chip factories.
A string of earnings reports this week suggests that the executives of the largest semiconductor companies have not backed down from expansion strategies in Asia and have not seen a major problem with the supply of goods in and out of the region.
Those fears have been fanned over the last few weeks by canceled technology conferences, travel restrictions by U.S. companies and quarantines. The flulike SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, has infected over 3,400 people and killed 160 people in the past six weeks.
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