– by Tina Gasperson –

The Disney Channel cartoon series The Proud Family (Flash plugin helpful), aired an episode on Oct. 5 entitled EZ Jackster. In the storyline, EZ Jackster is a Napster-like site, and the show’s little heroines get addicted to the service and play a part in the downfall of the music industry. Disney is one of the backers of the SSSCA proposed legislation that is scheduled for a hearing before Congress Oct. 25.The TV summary site, TV Tome, shows this synopsis of the episode in question:

“After Penny spends $125 on CDs with her five-cent salary, she meets a boy, Mega, who tells her about a napster-like website he made called EZ Jackster. All
weekend she was sitting at the computer, downloading music from EZ Jackster. Finally, Dijonay comes over and asks what she was doing over the weekend.
Penny asks Dijonay if she can keep a secret, knowing that she can’t. Penny tells Dijonay to tell everyone she knows about EZ Jackster. Her telling everybody about
EZ Jackster has a ripple-effect all around the world. From India to Africa to Suga Mama! But rap singer, Sir Paid-A-Lot is threatened by this because he got a
five-cents salary instead of his million-dollar salary. But suddenly, after wrestling, the news interrupted the next program telling about EZ Jackster. It shows a house
of where the EZ Jackster-spreader lives. Oscar comments how ugly the house is, not realizing it was their house. Trudy is mad at Penny for stealing music so she
takes away her computer. Later, Penny gets a call from Mega, asking if she is still using EZ Jackster. Will Penny listen to her parents?”

A post forwarded to the Linux-Elitists mailing list from one of the show’s viewers gave the rest of the details about the decidedly pro-SSSCA plot:

1. Girl working at her antiquated computer her dad gave her in
her
room.

2. Mystery guy (cool hip hop looking dude in black) shows up at
her
window and supplies her with an up to date computer, takes her
into
“the Matrix and shows her a web area called Free Jackster where
she
can get all the music she could ever want FOR FREE,

3. The girl asks if this is illegal and mystery guy explains it
is
our birthright to have free music, creativity should not have a
price

4. Girl gets addicted to collecting free music, her obsession
leads
to telling all her friends. soon the site is getting millions of
hits
from kids to grandmothers.

5. Next scene at the The Wizard Record Label board room where
“Sir
Paid Alot” enters to complain his royalty check was only five
cents.
This alerts The Wizard (head of the label) that there is a retail
problem he needs to look into.

6. Teen Girl’s house is surrounded that night by police and
press
and she is arrested for illegal downloads, gets a warning,. The
news
makes it clear that millions of people can’t be stopped, Parents
take
computer away from girl and explain why free downloads is
STEALING — kind of an abirdged explanation of how copyrights work.

7. Next scene, Asian Guy’s retail record store is empty, guy is
crying on the floor. Teen Girl who happens to work at the store
show
up to work, Asian guy fires her for supporting all the free
downloads

8. Next scene charts showing record sales are down down down to
nothing because people get the music for free

9. Mystery guy shows up at teen girl’s window again to try and
convince her to go back to downloading but she says NO

10. Guy: “You still downloading?” Teen Girl: “Downloading is
stealin’.” Mr. Guy from Free Jackster: “I know you are afraid I am
trying to show you a world without rules.” Teen girl says, “No, its
wrong.”

Windows XP isn’t that bad, writes ZDNet’s David Coursey, as long as you don’t ever change your hardware setup and cause the OS to think you’ve installed it on a new computer, as long as you never get serious about using wireless services, as long as you don’t want to encode MP3 files, or as long as you never ever do anything on a rather long list of tasks.

From Slashdot: “About a month ago, Richard Miller, CEO of VM Labs, announced
that “In the near future (I don’t want to commit to a date until we are sure of it),
we will release to the open development community the tools and documentation
that were used to develop these titles – both the games and the movie
enhancements. We will also release a few sample applications that can be freely downloaded from the
Internet, burned onto CD-R discs, and run on NUON DVD players that can read CD-Rs. Currently only the
N501 has this capability, but we anticipate that all future NUON based DVD players will read CD-R and
DVD-R media.” It’s not Linux, but unlike Indrema, the boxes are available.”

Posted at PR Newswire: “Responding to the
growing importance of XML content in e-business applications, Ipedo(TM), Inc.,
a leading provider of software products that manage and deliver dynamic
content over the Internet, today released the latest version of the Ipedo XML
Database(TM) featuring advanced capabilities to make it easier to gain better
control over an increasingly diverse array of enterprise XML.”

From LinuxSecurity.com: “This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include “Good Security information is crucial,” “An
Overview of LIDS,” and “Intrusion Detection Systems for the Uninitiated.” Also this week, several
interesting articles were written on privacy and encryption.”

Posted at PR Newswire: ” Workstation Solutions, Inc., the
leader in innovative data protection software, today announced new Linux
platform support for its Quick Restore(TM) backup and recovery software. This
broadened platform support extends Quick Restore’s fast implementation and
easy operation to the Debian GNU/Linux operating system”

GNU Emacs 21 has been released. Enjoy new and improved image support, color syntax highlighting, scrollbars, tooltips, and more. check out the changelog, download from your preferred mirror site.

Hans ter Harden writes: “Security hole in MS Office XP, read http://www.ciac.org/ciac/bulletins/m-005.shtml – “Microsoft Office XP and Internet Explorer version 5 and later are configured to request to send debugging information to Microsoft in the event of a program crash. The debugging information includes a memory dump which may contain all or part of the document being viewed or edited. This debug message potentially could contain sensitive, private information.”

The Register:Recently-issued patches for an exploitable RDP (Remote Data Protocol) bug in Win-NT and 2K have
given users trouble enough for MS to yank one of them (details below). The timing is unfortunate.
Only last week Microsoft Security Manager Scott Culp called on outside security researchers to follow
Redmond’s no-tell bug reporting example.”

Barbara Alvarado writes: “Paris, October 22, 2001 – With their outstanding projects on the use of standard open-source tools (Automake, Autoconf) to build Open CASCADE applications and on the development of a 5-axis machining component based on Open CASCADE, two North American developers have tied for first place in the Open CASCADE Developer Challenge. Robert Boehne of Chicago has won a week’s vacation for two in Cancun, Mexico, and Olivier Coma of Montreal has won a similar trip to Callinago, Guadeloupe.

The Open CASCADE Developer Challenge has demonstrated the interest of the developer community at large in the vast possibilities of these 3D modeling components for scientific and technical applications and has resulted in the enrichment of several areas of the software. Starting this week, winners will comment on their projects and their participation in the Challenge at http://www.opencascade.com/challenge/index.html. All new components and project descriptions from the winners will be available in Open Source on the http://www.opencascade.org Web site by early November.”