“Computer hackers who prey upon unsuspecting schools, striking fear in the hearts of entire communities with threats of violence, cannot go
unpunished,” said U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli (D-New Jersey). Wired News reports on Torricelli’s School Website Protection Act of 2001, a bill that, if it became law, would land anyone who “intentionally affects or impairs without authorization” a computer belonging to an educational instution in a federal prison for up to ten years. Critics say the bill is worded so vaguely that it could turn commonplace activities — such as a parent sending an e-mail message to their child’s teacher — into federal crimes to be investigated by the U.S. Secret Service.

ZDNet News: “David McOwen is losing a lot of sleep these days over his
decision to participate in a distributed computing project two
years ago.

The former computer administrator at DeKalb Technical College in
Georgia found out recently that he could face up to 30 years in jail and
fines totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars because he installed
some distributed computing software on the school’s computers. “

The Wireless Application Protocol Forum has released version 2.0 of its specification for communications and application displays on wireless Internet devices. One of the major additions to WAP 2.0 is the support for Extensible HTML (XHTML); previously, developers had to use Wireless Markup Language in addition to HTML when creating content for WAP-enabled devices. The addition of XHTML is expected to speed the adoption of the WAP standard. Full story at Network World Fusion.

ZDNet Interactive Week is reporting that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will review the Whoise database to figure out if it should allow people to register domain names anonymously in the future. Part of that review includes an online survey inviting people to comment on the existing practice of publishing domain name registrants’ personal details to the public.

Here’s a fun lead-in from a story at GlobeTechnology.com: “Today’s hackers are trying to mess with your computer. Two or three years from
now those same cyberterrorists could be trying to damage your cell phone, your pager or even
the appliances in your house.”

Internet.com reports that a former Diseny exec and a Digital Domain software engineer have teamed up to form Rebel Arts, a gaming platform development firm based in Calabasas, California. The duo’s new company wants to transform the world of massively multiplayer gaming into a profitable business. Part of their new technology platform (which is mostly proprietary) includes a cluster server system from Linux NetworX, and is designed to handle over 100,000 simeltaneous users generating more than two million transactions per second.

Dennis E. Powell talks about DSL in his latest column at LinuxPlanet. Not Digital Subscriber Line, the broadband technology that’s taking a few places in the world by storm, but the Design Science License — or as Powell calls it, the David Stutz License, in reference to its creator. This DSL is a plan for something best described as “progressive redistribution of talent.” Powell: “Let us say that you are a writer, a real idiot savant, capable of writing a book and getting it
published but so dimwitted as to be talked into the DSL. Your book can be changed entirely as to meaning, updated, altered
in any way imaginable, so long as it’s retitled sufficiently to distinguish it from the original, and you have nothing to say about
it, nor if money is made from it are you entitled to any.”

If you’ve ever been cornered at a social event by someone eager to have you diagnose his computer problems, Braddock Gaskill feels your pain. Venting in this piece at LinuxJournal, Gaskill writes: “The fact is that like most technology professionals, I hate the nitty gritty of computers. The only thing I dread more than attempting to get a new network card
installed, is having a conversation about attempting to get a new network card installed. Operating systems and hardware drivers are a necessary evil that
give me a platform from which I can effectively build elegant systems in mathematics and software.”

The Register reports that Macrovision’s SafeAudio technology has been bypassed. The technology, which has been quietly deployed for the past six months by record companies, was designed to prevent consumers from ripping CD tracks onto their hard drives. The bypass converts .wav files to RAM and mounts them as a readable volume, which can then be manipulated with any conventional ripping program.

Patrick Mullen writes “The Duke of URL has just posted its Linux Buyer’s Guide #12. The guide covers 3 systems, from low-end to high-end and focuses on configuring the
hardware for Linux. This is a great guide for anyone looking to build a Linux box and
make sure all of their hardware will work out of the box. In addition to this, the guide
covers info on the latest Linux compatible (and incompatible) hardware that has reached the market.”