High-Tech Users News
formerly
Windows User News
April
2003
Volume 13
# 4
National Edition
In This Issue
High-tech industry
news
Teenage student
arrested for stealing trade secrets from DirecTV
Japan now has
world’s fastest supercomputer
Computing tip
Quick review: Lexmark X85
Masthead
All telephone
numbers are in the 619 area code unless otherwise noted
High-Tech Industry News
New York and Delaware
easier on bankrupt companies
According to
data compiled by Lynn Lopucki of UCLA, if you are a company and need
the protection of the bankruptcy laws, you are much better off if you
file in either the NY or DE US District Courts. Companies that
file in those two districts face much more liberal restrictions on their
operations. It is known that if companies are not made to conform
closely to the laws, many will come out of bankruptcy not too changed
and therefore slip back into bankruptcy in a few years. In Delaware
42% of the companies that come out of bankruptcy will re-file within
five years. In the NY District, the rate of re-filers within five
years is 19%. This compares with a rate of 4% for the remainder
of the US. Of course, a company usually has little control over
which court it files for protection under the bankruptcy laws.
It largely depends on where they are incorporated and where they operate.
Need help with an appliance-repair?
An Internet
site helps people perform repairs on their home appliances. The
site, www.repairclinic.com, will walk you through many repairs.
They will even order parts for you, at your expense, if they are required
in the repair. The site was handling about 15,000 do-it-yourselfers
per month by late last summer. Even the repairperson with two
left-hands may become the latest home appliance repair guru with the
help of this Internet site.
American Express launches
online consolidated charity portal
American Express, www.americanexpress.com, has added a new portal to its online
operation designed to allow its cardholders to make charitable donations
from a consolidated location on the Internet. The American Express
Donation site has a database with greater than 800,000 charities around
the world linked with the Internet Revenue Service. The site includes
information on each of the non-profit organizations as well, including,
at a minimum, cost structures and mission statements. After submitting
donations through the Amex site, donors will receive an immediate email
confirming the transaction. The email confirmation also serves
as a receipt that states the charity given to and the amount that consumers
can use for tax purposes.
Yahoo wins favorable
decision from French court
In what Yahoo
hopes will end a three-year legal fight, a Paris court threw out accusations
by French human rights activists who said Yahoo should be held legally
responsible for auctions that were once held on its Internet site of
Nazi paraphernalia. The court ruled that Yahoo and its former
chief executive never sought to justify war crimes and crimes against
humanity as they were accused of doing by human rights activists, including
Holocaust survivors and their families. The case was initiated
in 2000, when France’s Union of Jewish Students and the International
Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League sued Yahoo for allowing Nazi collectibles,
including flags emblazoned with swastikas, to be sold on its auction
pages. The case led to a landmark ruling in France, with a court
ordering Yahoo to block Internet surfers in France from auctions selling
Nazi memorabilia. French law bars the display or sale of racist
material. Yahoo eventually banned Nazi material as it began charging
users to make auction listings, saying it did not want to profit from
such material. The company insisted the decision had nothing to
do with the proceedings in France, but it continued to oppose the French
case. The company even asked a federal judge in California to
affirm that countries that have laws that are more restrictive on freedom
of expression could not regulate US companies. The judge agreed.
Still angry at Yahoo’s attitude, French Holocaust survivors and their
families launched a second attack and were joined by a group called
the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People.
The parties sued for one symbolic Euro. But the Paris court said
that justifying war crimes means glorifying, praising or at least presenting
the crimes in question favorably. Yahoo and its auction pages
did not fit that description, the court said. Neither of the groups
that filed the complaints against Yahoo would say if they planned to
appeal the decision that was favorable to Yahoo.
Books collected at high-tech
event for deploying troops.
The Armed Forces
Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), www.afcea.org, San Diego Chapter, has collected
over 10,000 books for deploying troops at a recent conference and expo.
The AFCEA/US Naval Institute West 2003 Conference and Expo was held
at the San Diego Convention Center 14-16 January of this year.
The book drive was started last year and continues. The bulk of
the books were collected during the January show in San Diego.
AFCEA members as well as non-member attendees at the conference donated
most of the books. Many books included brief notes written in
support of the troops by conference attendees and local San Diego school
children. All types of books were included in the donations.
The books are being provided to Navy and Marine Corps personal as they
deploy from San Diego to the Prussian Gulf.
Mississippi high school
seniors building computers to be used in schools
In 40 of the
state’s high schools seniors have build about 6,000 computers that
are being used in classrooms throughout the state. The effort
was coordinated with the wiring of all of the state’s 30,000 classrooms
that were not already wired for Internet access. The state would
not have been able to afford to purchase the 6,000 computers that were
needed to complete providing Internet access in all the 30,000 classrooms.
Almost all the seniors participating in the building program had little
or no prior computer building experience. The building effort
was part of a computer engineering technology class at the high schools.
A grant of $4.4million was used by the state to purchase most of the
components and kits. Each kit cost $685, about half of what they
would have paid for comparable fully assembled machines. Each
kit features a fully assembled 15-inch monitor, 1GHz processor, 40Gigabyte
hard disk, CD drive, network card and Windows 98. Many of the
students took as long as 90 minutes to assemble their first machine
but after doing several, the time for each machine would often drop
into the 15-20 range. Some of the students, many of whom were
female, decided to make computer hardware their careers. Some
who had little or no computer experience before taking the class became
their school’s computer guru
Much illegal file sharing
taking place on colleges campuses
A US House
of Representatives judiciary subcommittee has found that academic officials
are not doing a good job of fighting illegal downloading of music, movies
and software on university campuses, according to the subcommittee chairperson.
It is estimated that 2.6billion music files and millions of movies are
illegally downloaded each month. College campuses are considered
a hotbed of Internet swapping activity. One of the primary reasons
for this is that most students living on their college campus have broadband
access provided to them at no charge. Research has indicated that
16% of all files on file-sharing networks and 10% of all users are on
college campuses. In a recent move by the Recording Industry Association
of America (RIAA) they asked colleges to crack down on this problem.
However, few colleges were willing to do what is necessary to slow or
stop this problem. Notable exceptions to this were the US military
service academies. They have cracked down on their students who
continue to illegally share files. Many of their students caught
are facing various penalties up to and including dismissal (see this
publication February 2003, Midshipmen’s computers seized in search
for online piracy.) The college-aged population is critical
to the entertainment industry because they usually spend freely on music
and movies. The people who get used to spending on music and movies
in college will usually become the industries’ best customers in their
later years. If the colleges are either unwilling or unable to
stop the illegal copying it will then be up to the US Congress to act.
Famous computer criminal
free to use the Internet again
The man whom
the US Government once called the most wanted computer criminal in US
history has won his battle to resume using the Internet. Kevin
Mitnick, who is now 39 years old, served five years in US federal prison
for stealing software and altering data at Motorola, Novell, Nokia,
Sun Microsystems and the University of Southern California (USC) in
Los Angeles. Prosecutors accused him of causing tens of millions
of dollars in damage to corporate computer networks. Mr. Mitnick
was freed in January 2000. The terms of his probation, which expired
on Jan 20 of this year, required that he get government permission before
using computers, software, modems or any devices that connect to the
Internet. His travel and employment were also limited by the terms
of the probation as well. He has been allowed to use a mobile
telephone and received permission last year to type a manuscript on
a computer not connected to the Internet. The deputy chief of
the Justice Department’s computer crime section and the former assistant
US attorney who prosecuted Mr. Mitnick said that once Mr. Mitnick’s
probation ended, he was not subject to any special surveillance.
Mr. Mitnick led the FBI on a three-year hunt that ended in 1995 when
agents arrested him in an apartment in Raleigh NC. During the
chase, Mr. Mitnick continued breaking into computer networks and became
a cult figure among hackers. He is probably the world’s best-known
computer criminal. Since his release from prison, Mr. Mitnick
has appeared on television, as an expert witness in the courtroom and
before Congress, offering advice about computer security. He also
wrote a book, The Art of Deception, which was published in October
2002 and describes ways in which computer network administrators are
duped into revealing security details which many times will ultimately
lead to a break-in.
Microsoft in court again
to defend the copyright on the name Windows
This spring
Lindows will be in court as trying to make the case that Windows
can not copyright an ordinary English word. Microsoft has been
fighting this case tooth and nail but has thus far been unable to obtain
an injunction against Lindows. This spring a jury is expected
to begin weighing whether Lindows is an illegal copycat brand
and whether Microsoft’s trademark on Windows should be taken
away. The Lindows operating system (OS) is based on the
free Linux OS. They are trying to compete with Windows
and have named their OS as a play on the name Windows.
Many say that a lot is riding on this for both companies. Others
say that a loss of the copyright on Windows would really mean
little since the OS name is so well known. It would open the way
for many other companies bringing out their own versions of Windows.
Imagine H-P Windows, IBM Windows, Dell Windows or AOL Windows.
What that would intimately mean for the computer industry is very difficult
to say. Could Microsoft just change the name of the famous OS
and go happily on their way? I guess the only way that we will
really find out is if Microsoft loses the case and their trademark
Windows. The CEO and founder of Lindows is Michael Robinson
who got his start in the computer industry as the CEO and founder of
MP3. We all remember MP3 as the file compression format that led
the way to Napster. That of course opened a giant ball of worms
that led to much legal activity in the industry.
IBM moves further into
the world of services and out of hardware
IBM has signed
a seven-year contract for info technology (IT) services with JP Morgan
Chase. It marks another major move by big blue away from depending
on sales of hardware and toward the sales of services. Until recently,
IBM relied on the sales of hardware for most of their revenue.
The contract is worth more than $5billion for the full seven years.
It is the largest service contract that IBM has entered into with a
firm in the financial services industry. JP Morgan Chase is the
second largest financial services firm in the US behind Citigroup.
JP Morgan is expecting to cut IT cost through the contract as compared
with their current and projected expenses of running their own IT operation.
Because of the agreement, JP Morgan Chase will transfer about 4,000
employees and contractors to IBM during the first half of this year.
Desktop computing support and other desktop services will remain in-house
and do not fall under the new contract. The contract is similar
to those signed by other financial services firms recently. In
December 2002 Bank One, the number three financial services firm in
the US, signed a ten-year $4.5billion IT deal with Electronic Data Systems
(EDS). In the same month Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s largest
financial services firms signed a long term IT contract with IBM.
As part of the deal with JP Morgan Chase, IBM will maintain 16,000 servers
worldwide, consolidate 30 networks into one global voice and data network,
and provide helpdesk services for more than 100,000 people worldwide.
Canadian technology
industry burning over blank CD fee
Canadians are
legally allowed to copy music for personal use. In exchange, a
small fee is added to the price of recordable CDs to compensate musicians
and music publishing companies. Similar royalties are collected
in more than 40 countries. In 2000, the levy per recordable CD
was 5.2 cents (Canadian); in 2001, the fee rose to CN$0.21. The
proposed fee for 2003 is CN$0.59. In addition, the Canadian Private
Copying Collective (CPCC), the music industry group that collects the
levy, has proposed new levies to be applied to any device that can store
music, such as removable hard drives, recordable DVDs, Compact Flash
memory cards and, of course, MP3 players. Since 1999, the CPCC
has collected more than CN$28 million in copyright compensation fees.
It expects to collect more than CN$100 million in levies next year.
Now the tech industry is pushing to have the law forcing collection
of the fee to be repealed. Tech industry groups point out that
the CPCC has not yet distributed a cent of the millions it has collected
in fees over the years to musicians. The fee is collected from
the product manufacturers but it is passed on to the end user.
Most consumers are not aware of the levy, because the recording industry
does not want to promote it knowing that awareness may lead to outrage
on the part of the public. If the tech industry has its way, the
levy will be eliminated.
Teenage student arrested
for stealing trade secrets from DirecTV
A 19-year-old
University of Chicago student was arrested in Los Angeles and charged
with stealing trade secrets from DirecTV, the nation’s leading satellite
television provider. Federal prosecutors said that Igor Serebryany
of Los Angeles would be charged under the rarely used 1996 Economic
Espionage Act (EEA) with stealing the documents, which described the
latest technology to control access to DirecTV, and releasing them on
the Internet. He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison
and a $250,000 fine. Prosecutors said Mr. Serebryany, a sophomore
at the University of Chicago, stole confidential papers about DirecTV’s
latest generation of satellite television smart cards from the law firm
of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue. He worked for an outside documents
preparation company and was imaging papers for a civil lawsuit over
DirecTV’s card technology. Jones Day represents DirecTV in a
lawsuit against NDS, the company that designs encrypted satellite cards
for DirecTV. According to prosecutors, Mr. Serebryany sent hundreds
of digital documents to three satellite pirate Web sites in September
and October. The confidential documents contained technical specifications
for DirecTV’s Period 4 generation of satellite smart cards, as well
as correspondence between NDS and DirecTV discussing the card’s architecture
and design. The technical details about the card are very valuable
because the three previous generations of DirecTV access cards have
already been hacked by pirates and have little or no value. Satellite
television smart cards, which slide into set-top boxes, contain computer
chips that decrypt signals from DirecTV’s satellites. Hacked
satellite television cards override the encryption technology, allowing
a viewer to receive the satellite signals free. While Mr. Serebryany
did not profit personally by releasing the documents, the EEA prohibits
the release of information to benefit others. Satellite piracy
is a huge underground industry estimated in the tens of millions of
dollars. Many of the pirate vendors are based in Canada where,
until this year, the legal status of pirating American satellite television
was ambiguous. Dozens of Web sites are devoted to satellite piracy.
Many of them serve as public forums for discussions on how to reverse-engineer
the Period 4 technology. DirecTV has been plagued by piracy.
The company has 11 million paying subscribers, but industry analysts
estimate that an additional million or more households illicitly receive
DirecTV signals. To combat the piracy, DirecTV spent $25 million
on research and development of Period 4, which it introduced last year.
The company is also spending tens of millions of dollars just to ship
the new cards to its subscribers. When all their subscribers have
the new Period 4 cards, the old cards will no longer be able to receive
the DirecTV signals. That will leave the million or so people
who illicitly receive the signals out in the cold unless they are able
to purchase an illegal Period 4 card.
Japan now has world’s
fastest supercomputer
Although it
is difficult to imagine, the world’s fastest supercomputer is able
to perform more computations in a second than there are stars in our
galaxy. The machine is now running at 36trillion calculations
per second. That makes it almost five times as fast as the world’s
next fastest computer.
The machine is called the Earth Simulator and is housed in a building
the size of an aircraft hangar in a suburban area just south of Tokyo.
Thirty-five million cubic feet of air are exhausted from the building
every 10 seconds to keep the machine from overheating. It was
built at a cost of $350million and one of its primary uses is for climate
research for which complex simulations are required. It is also
being used to track global sea temperatures, rainfall and the earth’s
crustal movement to hopefully predict natural disasters over the next
few centuries. Since early last year, the US has lost its dominance
in supercomputers. According to the US Department of Energy, the
Earth Simulator has put American scientists at a 10 to 100-fold disadvantage
in weather studies. The Japanese government is betting the machine’s
hefty price tag will more than pay off for the billions of dollars in
damage it could help save in mitigating disasters on the quake and eruption-prone
Japanese archipelago. The machine was built by Tokyo-based NEC;
the computer can already predict the path of a typhoon or a volcanic
eruption with remarkable precision. Earthquakes are still tough
to pinpoint or forecast, but likely epicenters are being identified
and their damage mapped out to determine which dams, buildings and highways
need reinforcing. Every time there is a significant increase in
the speed of the fastest supercomputers, you open the possibility of
a new science. Ironically, NEC used an old technology called vector
processing to achieve the Earth Simulator’s stunning performance.
Most supercomputer designers and US manufacturers had largely abandoned
the technology as outdated and too costly. Spurred on by the challenge
from Japan, the US government is now pouring money into the supercomputer
technology race. IBM, now with a $290 million government contract
to build two new supercomputers, says it will regain the No. 1 title
in 2004 with a 100-teraflop machine that would be nearly three times
faster than Earth Simulator. Cray has won a $90 million contract
to build a supercomputer for nuclear weapons simulations at Sandia National
Laboratory, also in 2004. In addition by 2010, Cray has taken
on a government challenge to create a computer that will be measured
in petaflops: an overwhelming 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
Where will it all stop? Actually it should never stop.
Computing
Tip / History
Many computer
users have a thoroughly overloaded desktop. Thirty or forty, or
in some cases even more, icons on the desktop can make for trouble sometimes
finding the one you are looking for. For most people many of the
desktop icons are seldom or never used. However, we are often
fearful of deleting any of them for fear that one day we will need to
access the program in question but the icon will be gone making it very
difficult to bring the program up. A trick that some people are
now using is to create a folder on the desktop called dormant.
This will allow you to move any desktop icons that that you do not use
with regularity to the dormant folder therefore getting them off the
desktop but not deleting them. To move any icon to the dormant
folder you just drag it to the folder and drop it. Be aware that
a small number of the icons on your desktop can not be moved off the
desktop and Windows will give you a message to that affect if you try
to move them. Also, be aware that using this method can significantly
change the appearance of your desktop and you may in fact see your wallpaper
again. This can be a problem if you do not like the wallpaper
on your desktop.
Quick Review
If you are
in the market for a new multifunction device (MFD) one of the new models
from Lexmark may be just the thing for you. We have been recently
been testing the X85, which is the replacement for the X83 that we reviewed
back in November 2001. We found the X83 an excellent machine and
its successor, the X85 is as good or better. The machines are
very similar with the major differences being the resolution and speed
being improved on the newer model.
Although it is called an MFD, it is technically not a fax machine.
In order to fax you must scan to fax, a very straightforward and simple
function on the X85. However, since it is not a stand alone fax
machine you must use the computer to actually fax. This can be
a double-edged sword as there are advantages and disadvantages to faxing
with the computer. One of the biggest advantages is the use of
the computer address book and the ability to broadcast fax very easily.
One of the major disadvantages is that the computer must of course be
running. That can be a big pain if you do not keep the computer
running all the time. In fact if you do not keep the computer
running at all times that you may be faxing I would not recommend an
MFD that is not also a standalone fax machine. Having to boot
a computer in order to send a fax is something nobody should have to
do. However, if the computer the MFD will be connected to runs
all times that you may be faxing an MFD like the X85 might be the best
deal and offer the most versatility.
The X85 performed very well. It produced high quality output even
in the quick or draft mode. The very good quality of output in
the draft mode allows its use for almost all output making the device
quite fast. In the draft mode, it is able to print up to 12 pages
per minute black and six pages per minute printing in color.
Copying is somewhat slower. The maximum copy speed is ten pages
per minute in black and three pages per minute in color mode.
It can be used as a standalone copier without the PC even being turned
on. It copies over a zoom range of 25% reduction to multiplication
of 400%. The MFD comes with a full complement of printing software
including:
Printer driver
ABBYY Fine Reader
4
Sprint OCR (for
text editing)
BVRP fax
MGI Photo Suite
The X85 supports all versions of Windows starting with 98. It
also supports the newer versions of the Mac OS starting 8.6. The
MSRP is $179 which is twenty dollars less that its predecessor was introduced
at. However, it has been on the market for about six months already
and is commonly found for as low as $149. We did our testing of
the machine using Windows 98 First Edition. The connection from
the X85 to the computer was via a USB cable with is not supplied in
the purchase of the device. The retailers where it can be found
include:
Best Buy
Circuit City
Dell
Staples
Wal-Mart
Overall the Lexmark X85 MFD is an excellent product and is highly versatile
and fast with good resolution, for such a low priced MFD. The
color output is also very good for a machine in this price range.
The paper used significantly affects the quality of output, especially
in color printing. For truly excellent photo output you should
use the heavyweight paper that is made for photo output from inkjet
printers. Laser printers are still a little higher in quality
of output than ink jets of which this MFD is one. Laser color
printers are still fairly costly with low end models remaining at over
$500.
Lexmark also makes somewhat lower end version of the X85 called the
X75. It performs almost all of the same functions but at somewhat
lower resolution and at slightly slower speeds. It does have one
advantage over the X85 and that is size. It is quite a bit smaller
that the model we tested. It is also lower priced and can be purchased
for as little as about $100 on sale. It is also more widely found
at retailers. Lexmark can be reached at www.lexmark.com. S Marder
High-Tech
Users News
Editor in Chief:
Stan Marder smarder@iname.com
Editor &
Webmaster: David Shanes
Online Editor:
Stuart Smiler smiler@san.rr.com
Associate
Editors: S Buffington, G Crofts,
T Kreckman, M Marder, A Rozenberg,
M Shanes
Copy Editor:
Jefferson Swycaffer
Event Coordinator:
Ed Mullins
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