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| | | September 7, 2003
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Sunday, September 7, 2003 |
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Colleges work to stop illegal file-sharing
In response to the increasingly vicious fight of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) with peer-to-peer file-swapping networks, U.S. colleges and universities have moved to clamp down on illicit trading of copyrighted music on their campus networks. Traditionally, students have represented the core user base of online file-sharing software and one of the top targets on RIAA's hit list of offenders.
Starting this school year, a number of institutions of higher education, among which Pennsylvania State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have begun an educational campaign, shedding light on the potential ramifications -- both legal and ethical -- of infringing music-owners' rights by using P2P software on campus. Schools have also started evaluating specialized software solutions aimed at restricting traffic generated by the most popular file-swapping products.
Universities are also looking into ways to provide fee-based music download services to their students as an alternative to controversial file-sharing. Some plans call for the inclusion of a paid online streaming service in students' board and room fees -- a practice frequently used by colleges with other services, such as cable television.
In the meantime, however, file-sharing software makers are not staying behind. Under the protection of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet search giant Google was forced to remove from its index database nine web sites, distributing a hacked, ad-free version of Kazaa. In a letter to the company, Australia-based Sharman Networks, maker of the popular Kazaa software, demanded that Google "immediately remove or disable all access to the infringing material" -- a product called Kazaa Lite, which excludes the company's pop-up advertising, often referred to as "spyware". Sharman Networks receives its revenue from ad banners served by its software and from a paid, ad-free version of the Kazaa program, called Kazaa Plus, which currently sells for $29.95.
More from: AP (via The Washington Post) | The Boston Globe | CNET News.com 1 2 | InternetNews.com | VNUNET.com | The Washington Post 1 2 3
Key online services go down
 A severe glitch left millions of America Online's customers without access to Microsoft-owned web sites. During a routine maintenance, which included routing tables updating, Road Runner, AOL's broadband Internet Service Provider, inadvertently cut off access to key web sites, among which the Hotmail e-mail service, the Passport authentication system, small-business oriented web site bCentral, popular news site MSNBC and the MSN portal. The problems started on Tuesday and reportedly lasted until Wednesday, when AOL Time Warner implemented a temporary fix for the issue. Microsoft completely denied responsibility for Road Runner's inaccessibility, saying the company had not altered its network infrastructure before the outage. Sources close to AOL told CNET News.com that the problems arose from an Internet peering agreement between America Online and Microsoft, which involved a connection by U.S. ISP Level 3.
More from: CNET News.com 1 2 | InternetNews.com
AOL's customers weren't the only ones experiencing accessibility problems. Lycos customers were left without e-mail access for most of the week after a scheduled system maintenance went astray. The company had warned its e-mail subscribers it was going to install updates to its database software on Tuesday to enhance backup capabilities, but the system recovered on Friday afternoon after Lycos was forced to rebuild its database. The web portal said no existing or incoming messages were lost due to the downtime.
More from: ABC News | CNET News.com
Security watch: Your 'Office' is vulnerable
After being heavily criticized for two major worm outbreaks this year alone -- the Slammer attack in January and Blaster's August fiesta, Microsoft warned its customers virtually all Office suite programs are critically open to attack. The software giant issued a patch for a buffer overflow vulnerability in its Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), fixing a susceptibility, which might allow a malicious attacker to overtake a user's computer system with a specifically malformed document.
VBA is used by a multitude of Microsoft-made programs, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and others, which allows for a wide range of potentially dangerous file formats.
The company also warned of four additional flaws in its products, including automatic execution of macros and a low-priority NetBIOS issue. Microsoft is urging all of its customers to immediately apply all necessary patches for their systems.
More from: CNET News.com | E-Commerce Times | Reuters (via Computerworld) | VNUNET.com 1 2
PeopleSoft sheds light on post-merger plans
After completing its acquisition of business software maker J.D. Edwards last month, PeopleSoft detailed its plans for the combined company, which now comfortably sits in the No. 2 spot of enterprise software makers, second only to German giant SAP AG.
In a conference call with analysts, PeopleSoft executives offered information on their integration plans and the future use of J.D. Edwards' products into PeopleSoft's software. The company also announced it plans to lay off up to 1,000 employees from its roughly 13,000-strong workforce. Neither developers nor members of the company's research division will be sacked, but marketing and middle management positions will be reduced.
At the same time, rival and hostile buyout bidder Oracle reiterated it will continue to pursue PeopleSoft. Earlier this year, the world's second largest software maker offered over $7 billion for PeopleSoft, but the proposal remains under antitrust review. Oracle's tender offer for $19.50 a share was extended to October 17 as the company goes on to rally PeopleSoft customers, promising it will keep supporting PeopleSoft products in a potential acquisition.
PeopleSoft, which fiercely opposes the offer, lost a round in court when a judge denied to force Oracle to publicize confidentially kept e-mails, which allegedly prove Larry Ellison's company is merely trying to disrupt its rival's business. Both PeopleSoft and Oracle vowed to prevail in their legal battles with each other.
More from: CNET News.com 1 2 3 4 | Computerworld 1 2 | InternetNews.com 1 2 3 | News Factor 1 2
In Other News...
The SCO Group will likely start invoicing corporate Linux users in the coming weeks. SCO claims the Linux kernel contains code owned by the Utah-based software maker. The first batch of licensing invoices is expected to hit about 1,000 U.S. corporations, running Linux servers.
U.S. authorities arrested a 53-year-old man under the recently enacted Truth in Domain Names Act, charging him of alluring children to pornographic web sites by registering domain names similar to those of sites popular with kids and teenagers.
eBay shut down an online auction of purchased songs via Apple's iTunes Music Store. The auction was used to highlight the still unresolved problem with reselling legally bought copyrighted works in digital form.
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