NetHappenings NEWS HEADLINES AND RESOURCES

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11/10/05

Hi Everyone,

Here are the collected and selected NetHappenings Headlines from the past week that are worth reading.

best,

<Karen>


Silicon Insider: Forbes Fumbles the Blogosphere Does an Attack on Bloggers Signal the Dawn of Blogosphere-Dominant Media?
Nov. 3, 2005 - It's deja vu all over again.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/print?id=750595
I was halfway through the blogosphere summit in Manhattan last week, running back and forth to the podium introducing speakers, when it suddenly hit me: I've seen all of this before. The dedicated entrepreneurs, the explosion of new words and terms, loud disagreements on what it all means, the venture capitalists watching and waiting for the first business to break out before they break in with bags of cash. It was in 1995, at the birth of the dot-com boom. And I had seen other versions of the same thing before that: in 1980 at the start of the PC boom, and just before that, during the birth of the video game industry. You only get a few of these epiphanies in your career, and usually you don't recognize them when they happen. But I've lived in Silicon Valley and attended enough boom births to see this for what it is. The numbers should tell you all you need to know: There are an estimated 20 million bloggers out there. Now, we can assume that 90 percent, even 99 percent, are largely novelties put up by folks who stick their Web journals up for a few weeks then move on to something else, perhaps adding a new entry every month or two. But even in the most pessimistic scenario, that still leaves 200,000 serious bloggers out there, scattered throughout the world, talking about everything under the sun, from politics to pet care, shoes to spelunking. That's 200,000 entrepreneurial startups, 50 times that of the number of new dot-coms a decade ago. That's more than enough critical mass to kick off a boom. <snip>

Virus Scanners Made Moot by New Exploit
http://tinyurl.com/9zre5 By Larry Loeb November 3, 2005
Anti-virus software has always lived with the tradeoff of performance versus thoroughness. It's led to some software design decisions on the methods of how files are actually scanned that are now coming home to roost. Recently, researcher Andrey Bayora revealed that it is possible to fool the scanners into thinking that a file under scan is one kind, when it is in actuality something entirely different. Bayora (of securityelf.org), a Russian-born Israeli, has issued an advisory that details how to bypass many popular Windows AV programs. Bayora says that he told vendors in July about what he found. He also says that none of them ever got back to him. The exploit is fully discussed in the white paper he wrote that is available at www.securityelf.org/magicbyte.html. <snip>

Vatican: Faithful Should Listen to Science
By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press Writer
November 04,2005 | VATICAN CITY -- A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into "fundamentalism" if it ignores scientific reason. Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the "mutual prejudice" between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States. The Vatican project was inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1992 declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension." Galileo was condemned for supporting Nicolaus Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun; church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe. <snip>

Anonymous sperm donor traced using DNA, Internet
Here's a clever 15 year old. First he uses DNA to find two men with very similar genes to himself and the same last name. His mother knew the date and place of birth of the unidentified donor. Only one person with that name was born at that time in that place. It seems to be time to figure out the risk of re-identifiability using {DNA, DoB, place of birth} along with genealogical databases.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825244.200

SBC Head Ignites Access Debate By Arshad Mohammed
Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, November 4, 2005; D01
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/03/ AR2005110302211.html>
The head of a major telecommunications company stirred up a hornets' nest this week by suggesting that he wants to charge companies like Google and Yahoo a fee for bringing them into consumers' homes. SBC Communications Inc. Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr.'s comments to Business Week magazine prompted Internet companies to accuse him of aspiring to block access to their Web sites and to extort money from their businesses. A spokesman for San Antonio-based SBC said the second-largest U.S. telecom company is committed to giving customers unfettered access to the Internet and that the comments were misinterpreted. <snip>

Amsterdam's Fiber to the Home Project and implications EuroTelco Blog
http://eurotelcoblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/and-answer-is.html
[... Frequent readers of this blog will no doubt recall the frequency with which I have referred to the proposed Citynet (http://www.citynet.nl/) FTTP project in Amsterdam. Well the embargo is now lifted, so I can reveal that Phase 1 has been formally proposed (to be debated and voted on by the City Council later this month), and the funding structure has been finalized. The City of Amsterdam is to be a 1/3 shareholder, with a consortium of five housing companies (also 1/3) and other unnamed investors (1/3). I'm curious to know who the other unnamed investors are. My guess is someone with a long-term view of investing and a preference for long-term predictability of returns. We are talking about a 20 - 30 year horizon here, so my
gut feeling is that insurance companies are involved somehow.
Phase 1 consists of 40k premises, roughly 10% of Amsterdam, to begin in early 2006. Infrastructure build is to be carried out by Van den Berg and Draka Comteq, and bbned will be the wholesale network operator. <snip>

Democrats HELP defeat Online Freedom of Speech Act in House Vote tally:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll559.xml
Text of bill: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:h.r.01606:
Democrats defeat election-law aid for bloggers November 2, 2005, 7:55 PM PST
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5929587.html
Democrats on Wednesday managed to defeat a bill aimed at amending U.S. election laws to immunize bloggers from hundreds of pages of federal regulations. In an acrimonious debate that broke largely along party lines, more than three-quarters of congressional Democrats voted to oppose the reform bill, which had enjoyed wide support from online activists and Web commentators worried about having to comply with a tangled skein of rules. <snip>

Breathalyzer source code must be disclosed, Florida court says
Text of Florida court opinion:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/breathalyzer.source.code.ruling.110305.pdf Breathalyzer source code must be disclosed November 3, 2005, 3:10 PM
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5931553.html
Florida police can't use electronic breathalyzers as courtroom evidence against drivers unless the innards are disclosed, a state court ruled Wednesday. <snip>


Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art and Science for the 21st Century By JOHN MARKOFF November 5, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/05/arts/05lab.html? ex=1288846800&en=aa5efaf84e49bac4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
SAN DIEGO, Oct. 29 - As an actor and a founder of the politically active Electronic Disturbance Theater, Ricardo R. Dominguez is an unlikely faculty member at the nanoscience, wireless and supercomputing laboratory that opened its doors here on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, on Oct. 28. However, Mr. Dominguez and an eclectic group of computer musicians, computer game designers and nanotechnology artists are very much a part of the futuristic research "collaboratory" being assembled by the astrophysicist Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, a $400 million research consortium assembled over the last five years. Mr. Smarr's idea can be discerned even in the architecture of the new Atkinson Hall, which is connected via 155 fiber-optic cables to the rest of the campus and to a smaller partner laboratory 75 miles away at the University of California, Irvine, as well as to research centers around the world. <snip>


The U.N. Isn't a Threat to the Net By Kofi A. Annan Saturday, November 5, 2005; A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/ AR2005110401431.html
The main objective of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held this month in Tunisia is to ensure that poor countries get the full benefits that new information and communication technologies -- including the Internet -- can bring to economic and social development. But as the meeting draws nearer, there is a growing chorus of misinformation about it. One mistaken notion is that the United Nations wants to "take over," police or otherwise control the Internet. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The United Nations wants only to ensure the Internet's global reach, and that effort is at the heart of this summit. Strong feelings about protecting the Internet are to be expected. In its short life, the Internet has become an agent of revolutionary change in health, education, journalism and politics, among other areas. In the United Nations' own work for development, we have glimpsed only the beginning of the benefits it can provide: for victims of disaster, quicker, better-coordinated relief; for poor people in remote areas, lifesaving medical information; and, for people trapped under repressive governments, access to uncensored information as well as an outlet to air their grievances and appeal for help.
More on this:The icann election results appear to be out
http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/11/05/icann_nomcom_announces_new_
members_including_susan_crawford_to_icann_boa rd.html <snip>

The Open Source WRT54G Story November 8, 2005
<http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3562391>
The story of the Linksys Wireless-G Router (model WRT54G) and how you can turn a $60 router into a $600 router is a little bit CSI and a little bit Freaks & Geeks. Its also the story of how the open source movement can produce a win-win scenario for both consumers and commercial vendors. Whats especially exciting is that tricking out this router doesnt require any eBay sleuthing or other hunt for some off-the-wall piece of hardware. Instead, grab it off-the-shelf. The WRT54G is stacked high in every Best Buy and Circuit City across the country and, of course, most online retailers Amazon.com sells it for $55. Its ubiquitous and, some would say, a diamond in the rough. Or a wolf in sheeps clothing. While routers used to be the domain of networking specialists, they've gone mainstream along with residential broadband. Commodity routers can be had for as little as well, "free after rebate in some cases, and often not much more. To keep them cheap, consumer- grade vendors like Linksys repackage designs from OEM vendors rather than design the hardware and software in-house. The tradeoff for these sub-$100 routers can be reliability, particularly in the coding of the firmware the software brain that controls the routers functions. Consumer-grade firmware may be buggy, and may be limited in functionality compared to commercial- grade routers designed for business such as those made by Cisco and SonicWall. <snip>

Pitt University Times:
www.umc.pitt.edu:591/u/FMPro?-db=ustory&-lay=a&-
"State hearings on liberal bias set for Nov. 9th and 10th" and it describes the forthcoming investigation into whether the professors at PA state universities are exhibiting a political bias in their teaching. This investigation is the result of a resolution brought forward by a state representative from Lancaster County. Among his reasons for concern: "There is a national trend toward indoctination, rather than education." <snip>


Yahoo, Google to Launch Wireless Services By Reuters November 7, 2005
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1882694,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594>
Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. are set to roll out new wireless services, taking advantage of advanced networks and cellphones to provide features similar to those available on
computers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Yahoo soon will introduce a cellphone it will sell through a partnership with SBC Communications, according to SBC executives. The phone will take Yahoo a step closer to linking music, photos and email with consumers' existing online accounts, address books and preferences, the paper said. Google is tailoring some Internet services for use on wireless devices. Starting Monday, consumers using some types of cellphones will be able to access satellite maps wirelessly as they can on the Google Maps service, the paper said. <snip>

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