The Register: “Sony’s Music Entertainment division has been testing an anti-piracy technology
that at best renders illegally copied CDs unlistenable and at worse blows listeners’
speakers.

The anti-piracy system, called Cactus Data Shield, was developed by Israeli
technology company Midbar Tech. Research conducted by New Scientist magazine
and reported in this week’s issue shows how Cactus works. Like Macrovision’s
SafeAudio, Cactus adds noise to the music data stored on the CD. Unlike
SafeAudio, Cactus flags the noise as control information. On playback, this is
ignored, but on duplication – even with consumer CD-to-CD systems, which are
not disabled by SafeAudio – the noise disrupts the copier’s error correction system.”

An anonymous reader writes: “In a setback for terrestrial radio stations that stream their broadcasts over the Net, a federal court has ruled that they must pay to stream. The loss means that broadcasters are liable for fees to the record industry retroactive to when their Net broadcasts first aired. That means tens-of-millions of dollars in past fees are owed by network giants like Infinity Broadcasting alone.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/radiolose. html“

The Register: “Be has found a buyer for its operating system and the development team behind,
sources close to the company have toldThe Register.

The job cuts the company announced this week are an efforts to streamline the
workforce to meet the conditions laid down by the buyer, who as yet remains known
only to senior Be executives.”

Wired: “Protecting Microsoft’s IIS server from Code Red requires a simple patch for a hole. But with 42 security bulletins already issued this year, even experts are having a tough time keeping their Microsoft software up to date.”

CNET: “After months of operating in stealth mode, reunited Netscape Communications alumni will
launch their peer-to-peer content distribution company early next week.

The brainchild of several key veterans of Netscape–now a unit of AOL Time Warner–Kontiki
will offer a way to speed downloads over the Internet, with a focus on video files.”

Wired: “Coding demos used to be a purely male pursuit. But so many women were dragged to demo parties by their boyfriends, ther’ve starting to do it too. Steve Kettmann reports from Assembly 01 in Helsinki.”

Kelly McNeill writes: “If scientists and researchers at the Globus project have their way, the heart of future computing power might look no more exotic than your present-day electric company’s local power grid. But bigger. Much bigger. “Grid computing,” the next big thing in global Internet technology, involves linking networks run by clusters of powerful servers that can be tapped into by those needing computing power. In other words, if you need some computing power, you will simply log on to your PC or use your telephone to order it. “You’ll get computing power and storage capacity — not from your own computer but over the Internet on demand,” said IBM research executive Irving Wladawsky-Berger. “You pay for what you use, pretty much the way you do with electric power.”

Christoph Wille writes: “A new beta version of SharpDevelop, the open-source C# IDE for .NET, has been released. Besides the usual bug fixes, it features an NUnit compatible testing framework, basic CVS support integrated with the IDE, a preview of code completion and some other “minor” new features. In addition, it comes with eight different UI languages. You can download it from here.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, advisories were released for telnetd, windowmaker, apache-ssl, openssl, the Linux kernel, and
imp. The vendors include Caldera, Debian, and FreeBSD.”

CNet reports that Metricom is closing its 17-city ricochet wireless Internet conncetion service after failing to find a buyer for the financially troubled company.