Modern PC News for the Week Ending Feb 25, 2003

• Opera Bork - The Swedish Chef Goes After Microsoft
• Yamaha Releases DiscT@2 - CD Burner & Printer Device
• Microsoft Enters The Medical Market with "InfoPath"
• Microsoft to Offer Office 11 Beta 2 to Everyone
• Hey, Dude, You're Getting a Cell!
• Virtual / Projected Keyboards Won't Arrive This Year
• If Everybody Ignores Spam, Why Do We Still Get So Much?
• Police Seize Guns Disguised as Mobile Phones
• SCSI, ATA Groups Build Serial Compatibility
• Intel Arizona Chip Plant Getting $2 Billion Upgrade
• End of an Era - zOverture to Buy AltaVista for $140M
• Interesting Password Flaw Discovered in Windows XP

Two weeks ago it was revealed that Microsoft's MSN portal targeted Opera users, by purposely providing them with a broken page. As a reply to MSN's treatment of its users, Opera Software today released a very special Bork edition of its Opera 7 for Windows browser. The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing the MSN site will see the page transformed into the language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork! ...

For more technical documentation, see the article Why doesn't MSN work with Opera? Opera 7.01 for Windows in Bork can be downloaded from ftp.opera.com.

YamahaMultimedia.com | Yamaha Releases DiscT@2 - CD Burner & Printer Device

FutureShop.ca was selling these internal IDE devices for $179 but they have now been removed from their site.

DiscT@2 is an exclusive Yamaha feature that allows text and images to be drawn on the unused portion of a CD-R disc. You can now etch a memo, your signature, photo thumbnails or your company's logo right onto the bottom of the disc.

In a normal recording, the recording application will supply a CD recorder with raw digital data, to which the recorder's hardware adds header and error correction information, and then converts it to what is known as EFM (Eight-to-Fourteen-Modulation) patterns. These are the little bits of data that get written to disc.

Microsoft.com | Microsoft Enters The Medical Market with "InfoPath"

At the annual conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Microsoft unveiled the official name of a new product being developed by the Office group, Microsoft InfoPath, formerly code-named "XDocs."

...InfoPath is a client application that combines the familiarity of a traditional word-processing program with the rigorous data-capture capabilities of a forms package. InfoPath connects end users directly to XML content and databases dynamically, allowing them to directly access, create and update key business data.

Click graphic to enlarge

BetaNews.com | Microsoft to Offer Office 11 Beta 2 to Everyone
By Nate Mook

With the second beta release of Office 11 on the horizon, Microsoft has begun to make final preparations in anticipation of the beta's widespread availability. Beta 2 kits will be offered for purchase through a customer preview program, as well as being sent to testers and Redmond partners. This week Microsoft announced it had given the name "InfoPath" to the new Office application formerly code-named Xdocs. Sources say Microsoft has also tentatively settled on "Office 2003" as the new suite's official product name.

TheSmokingGun.com | Hey, Dude, You're Getting a Cell!

Benjamin Curtis, the 22-year-old actor who portrays "Steven," the Dell Guy, in those bothersome computer commercials, was arrested late last night (2/9) on a marijuana possession charge, The Smoking Gun has learned. According to police, Curtis was nabbed after cops spotted him buying a "small bag of marijuana" from a dealer on Manhattan's Lower East Side (at Ludlow and Rivington for you Gothamites). Curtis, who lives in lower Manhattan, was charged with criminal possession of marijuana, while Omar Mendez, the 19-year-old alleged dealer, faces drug sale and possession charges...

Commodore.ca - Virtual / Projected Keyboards Won't Arrive This Year

After contacting the three developers of Projected Keyboards, Canesta, VKB Inc, and Virtual Devices, it is apparent that there will be no significant product in 2003.  Canesta indicates they will likely have product by the fall of this year but there will by no means be wide spread adoption of this technology.

One has to wonder if this technology is as functional as promissed.  All three companies indicated that they have demo product that proves the technology is ready, but if it is ready... where is it?

from eetimes.com: The 0.25-micron sensor chip at the heart of the solution includes a barrel lens that senses the light bouncing off a finger. The chip and lens together measure 8 x 8 x 8 mm. The infrared light source is in a separate 6.4-mm diameter x 12-mm module. And the pattern projector measures 9 x 9 x 12 mm. All three devices need to point outward from the system in a similar orientation — a tricky placement and integration challenge for a PDA and one currently not feasible for the next-generation of relatively thin 2.5G cellphones.

Wired.com | If Everybody Ignores Spam, Why Do We Still Get So Much?
By Michelle Delio | Thanx for Damiana for this one

The human gene pool should be incapable of producing enough idiots to financially support the vast number of spammers whose scat litters so many inboxes.  So how do spammers make any money when no one with even half a clue admits to doing business with them? Are there legions of poverty-stricken spammers out there who are slowly starving to death?

Unfortunately, no.

A significant number of spammers apparently aren't at all interested in whether anyone buys their wares. Instead, they feed off other spammers in a bizarre cannibalistic pyramid scheme.  Turns out, most spammers make money selling e-mail addresses to other spammers, who then sell those same addresses to others. It's like the legendary snake eating its own tail.

Wired News tested the nature of the spam spin cycle by replying with a request for more information to a randomly selected sample of 75 recent junk messages, using a dozen free e-mail accounts from six different services.

Finding No. 1: Replying to spam will always result in more spam. In fact, 56 percent of the spammers in the Wired News test never replied to requests for more information on their product or service. Instead, the customer's e-mail address was passed along -- presumably sold -- to other spammers, roughly half of whom also did not reply to requests for product information, but again just passed along the address to other spammers.

Seventeen percent of the replies to requests for more information gave rise to what appeared to be "legitimate" offers: people with a real product to sell who were actually interested in selling it.

Most of them were unaware that the recipient hadn't requested their sales pitch. Whoever sold them the e-mail addresses had assured them the recipients wanted the information. A few did not understand what spamming was, or that it was considered to be a less-than-legitimate business practice.

Sixteen percent of the spam messages turned out to be blatant scams.

...Responding to assorted "Make Money at Home" offers netted three multi-page Word documents. One looked like it had been copied off an ancient dot matrix printout and contained a list of "hot prospect" e-mail addresses, along with a price list for software products the customer would need in her new career as a kitchen-table entrepreneur (read: spammer).

...For $12, budding Net moguls receive an 11-page treatise on how to sell products on eBay (information primarily culled from the auction site's own help files).

...Replying to an enticing offer to "Find Out Anything About Anyone" for $10 netted a smeary printout of postal addresses, some URLs of publicly available databases and directions on how to search the Internet.

...Eleven percent of the requests for additional information bounced back with a message that the spammer's account had been closed due to complaints to the ISP.

Only the spam offers for pornography consistently delivered exactly the sort of materials they promised...

TheRegister.co.uk | Police Seize Guns Disguised as Mobile Phones
Thanx to Rollando for this one

Rouen police have seized two 'mobile phone' guns in a drugs-related raid in Elbeuf, Seine-Maritime, reports Agence-France Presse. The devices, which can fire four .22 bullets in the approximate direction of a victim, appear to be the ones of mysterious Eastern European origin which turn up every now and again.

These are just about passable these days as not very attractive or state of the art handsets, as used by poor people (one really would expect drug dealers to have more of a sense of style). Except they're heavier, thanks to the four barrels and bullets. Except they've got a strange cocking lever on the bottom (er, would you believe it's a clockwork phone, M le gendarme?) Except it's got four holes in the top, doesn't light up or work (as a phone, that is), and possibly has an odd whiff about it, if it's been used recently...

TomsHardware.com | SCSI, ATA Groups Build Serial Compatibility

Wired.com | Intel Arizona Chip Plant Getting $2 Billion Upgrade

Intel said on Tuesday it would spend $2 billion to upgrade an Arizona plant with cutting-edge chip-making technology, saying it wanted to outpace rivals when the market began to recover.

...Intel has also pulled back on some investments. It said last month that it planned $3.5 billion to $3.9 billion in capital expenditures in 2003, down from $4.7 billion in 2002.

Yahoo.com | End of an Erra - Overture to Buy AltaVista for $140M

Advertising-driven search engine Overture Services Inc. on Tuesday announced it will buy fallen Internet star AltaVista for $140 million, upping the stakes in a quest for search engine supremacy.

...AltaVista's sales price reflects the depths of the company's downfall. AltaVista was valued at nearly $3 billion in August 1999 when Andover, Mass.-based CMGI Inc. bought its 81.5 percent stake in the company.

...By January 2000, AltaVista had amassed $765 million in losses, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (news - web sites) filing for an initial public offering of stock that never happened. The company's continuing troubles prompted AltaVista to eliminate about 500 jobs during its past two fiscal two years, reducing its payroll to about 250 employees today...

ITWorldCanada.com | Interesting Password Flaw Discovered in Windows XP
By Ryan B. Patrick

A security flaw recently revealed in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP could enable unauthorized users to access password-protected PCs.

Using the Windows 2000 CD, anonymous users can apparently boot up a computer with the Windows XP OS and call up the troubleshooting program Windows 2000 Recovery Console.

Using the program's system recovery routine, the unauthorized user can then work under the guise of a Windows XP Adminstrator, effectively rendering any passwords useless. The flaw affects all XP user accounts, password-protected or not — visitors can then access files from the hard drive and copy to any removable media...