NetHappenings Headlines

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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 BlogosphereDoes an Attack on
Bloggers Signal the Dawn of Blogosphere-Dominant Media?Commentary
By MICHAEL S. MALONE
Nov. 3, 2005 ? - It's déjà 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
www.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>
--

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Vatican: Faithful Should Listen to Science
By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press Writer
http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8DLNKR0J.html
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

<snip>
--

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 PST
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>
--

November 5, 2005
Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art and Science for the
21st Century
By JOHN MARKOFF
<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. It?s also the story of how the open source
movement can produce a win-win scenario for both consumers and
commercial vendors. What?s especially exciting is that tricking out
this router doesn?t 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. It?s ubiquitous and, some would say, a diamond in the rough.
Or a wolf in sheep?s 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 router?s 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>

--

"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."
Read the entire article at the Pitt University Times:
<hhtp://www.umc.pitt.edu:591/u/FMPro?-db=ustory&-lay=a&- format=d.html&storyid=3854&-Find>

<snip>
--

Yahoo, Google to Launch Wireless Services
By  Reuters
November 7, 2005
<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1882694,00.asp? kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594>
NEW YORK (Reuters) - 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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