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A second debris site, 6 to 8 miles from the original crash site of the Somerset county plane has been found. This does not jive with what we know now.

The thinking now is that an A) explosive device went off on the plane or B) we shot it down. Dont be so horrified by this second possibility. Its better than it crashing into another populated building. Read the article. Its amazing.

"Bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire and Islamic militant, believed to be in exile in Afghanistan, was blamed for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 224 people died.

An Arab journalist with access to bin Laden told Reuters in London that the renegade Saudi three weeks ago had warned of an "unprecedented attack" on U.S. interests. "

-c

Thought I'd take a look at the story. Clicked on the link, ended up at their:

``you're-behind-the-times-so-we-won't-tell-you

As it happens, I'm running Mozilla 0.9.2 on WinNT (yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what the company supplies me with). I may have told it to lie a wee bit about its, and my, identity, but is that any reason to cut me off from seeing those ads the customers are paying them to run?

Microsoft Breakup Decision Overturned by the Court of Appeals

Judge Jackson had compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers".

by Michael Jennings

(Thursday, June 28, 2001) Today the Court of Appeals handling the Microsoft anti-trust case overturned the lower court's decision to split Microsoft into two or more companies. The breakup would have placed the Microsoft Windows operating system in one company and created a second business for everything else.

This decision of the Court of Appeals has been widely recognized as fair because of the behaviour of the judge of the lower court, in which he had not given the required appearance of impartiality. Judge Jackson had, for example, compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers", and Bill Gates to Napoleon. (See page 111 of the Court's decision [PDF format]).

The Court of Appeals found that Judge Jackson's 206-page Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal conduct, was entirely acceptable. It was his conduct outside the courtroom that was a violation of the code of conduct for United States judges. (For more about this, see pages 111 to 115 of the decision.)

Earlier, many people had praised Judge Jackson's skill in handling the case inside the courtroom. Technically oriented observers considered the Findings of Fact to be very well informed.

However, the penalty that Judge Jackson recommended for Microsoft was voided because of his public misconduct. The Court of Appeals directed that a new district judge examine the case, using the Findings of Fact as a starting point.

The story is very widely reported. For examples, see: ABC, AP, BBC, Washington Post, Seattle Times, CNet, The Industry Standard, Reuters, Guardian, Motley Fool, and MSNBC. The NY Times article requires that you register. Registration is free.

Silicon Valley.com said "[Microsoft] can continue its brutal practices for a while longer..."

There were two parts to the anti-trust case, 1) the Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal activity, and 2) the remedy, which is what would happen as a result of the court finding illegal activity. Judge Jackson had ordered that Microsoft be broken into two companies. It is only this second part, the remedy, that has been voided (vacated) by the Court of Appeals.

The Court of Appeals wrote, "We vacate the judgment on remedies, because the trial judge engaged in impermissible ex parte [outside the court] contacts by holding secret interviews with members of the media and made numerous offensive comments about Microsoft officials in public statements outside of the courtroom, giving rise to an appearance of partiality."

The Court of Appeals added, "Although we find no evidence of actual bias, we hold that the actions of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings before the District Court and called into question the integrity of the judicial process."

The ruling of the Court of Appeals was unanimous, by a 7-0 vote.

More links:

Open Secrets.org report on Microsoft soft money donations

Common Cause report on Microsoft political contributions

Antitrust Law and Economics Review

Older Articles:

Microsoft Unfazed by Threat of New Antitrust Suits (Thursday, June 21, 2001)

What, me worry? Microsoft's Ballmer stays cool, confident, composed. (PC World, June 17, 1998)

Michael Jennings
Futurepower®
P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
U.S.A.

Tel: (503) 233-7820
Fax: (419) 781-4606
E-Mail: jennings_michael @ hotmail.com (remove spaces)

Futurepower is a registered trademark.
Copyright 2001

The US is also the the place where radio-stations can get enormous fines for playing even the censored version of Enimem-songs. Is that freedom?
It is the new Bush-administration that tries to clean up obscenity and indecency.
This is no troll, the popular opinion that "the US has laws ensuring more freedom than any other nation", is not always correct.
Here is my source: Reuters.

More high-tech patent news

In case of slashdotting, please click HERE.

Very cool story -- even though I won't move solar sails from my "Vaporware" until I actually see one in outer space...

Well given that eToys' shares are currently worth about 25 cents and they just announced third quarter losses of about 52 cents a share - much larger than predicted - it doesn't look like eToys is much longer for this world. Given that, it may seem pointless and vindictive for etoy to be going after them at this point.

But consider this: when eToys goes bankrupt, its assets will be put up for sale. Like most dotcoms, the main asset of this company is likely their domain name. If another company buys the domain, there is always the chance that with fresh money and fresh lawyers, they once again pursue the attack on etoy.

By counter attacking now, etoy is in a good position to protect themselves once and for all. First of all, with eToys on the financial ropes, they will have less money to throw at lawyers to defend themselves. Secondly, and most importantly, if etoy wins, they will prevent many potential future headaches for themselves. Even if eToys goes down before the suit is settled, the legal cloud hovering over the etoys.com domain "property" will make it much less attractive to prospective buyers.

Trickster Coyote
Ignore that man behind the curtain.

There is an article at Reuters about how Microsoft is teaming up with Leggo to formulate games for MSN and Microsoft's upcoming Xbox video game console. The scariest part is at the end of the article.
"Microsoft's MSN has also recently struck deals with the Walt Disney Interactive Group, Viacom Inc.'s Nickelodeon kids cable television network, and espresso empire Starbucks Corp."
Yeah, that's what we need. Gates Empire teaming up with Uncle Walt's Empire and Mega-Mega giant Starbucks to bring you 'MSN at Night' re-runs. Be afraid. Be very very afraid.

There is an article at Reuters about how Microsoft is teaming up with Leggo to formulate games for MSN and Microsoft's upcoming Xbox video game console. The scariest part is at the end of the article.
"Microsoft's MSN has also recently struck deals with the Walt Disney Interactive Group, Viacom Inc.'s Nickelodeon kids cable television network, and espresso empire Starbucks Corp."
Yeah, that's what we need. Gates Empire teaming up with Uncle Walt's Empire and Mega-Mega giant Starbucks to bring you 'MSN at Night' re-runs. Be afraid. Be very very afraid.

duh

Same thing said here at the BBC, and here at Reuters.

The weekend did not manage to quell the massive amounts of coverage the Microsoft infiltration continues to garner. Virtually every news organization has its own version of the Microsoft debacle, of which we've provided a sampling below. Meanwhile, we are left wondering why the crown jewels of Microsoft were left at the mercy of passwords. There are all sorts of other authentication technologies that we have no doubt Microsoft will be investigating. Perhaps utilizing the smart card support in Windows 2000 wouldn't be a bad idea. It's a shame it takes negative incidents like this to get people to consider security as a strategic business issue. Shame on you, Microsoft.

• The Wall Street Journal via MSNBC
• CNET
• MSNBC via ZDNet
• Reuters via Yahoo
• The Register

ou've heard it before and you'll hear it again. Threats are evolving. We've seen viruses retrieve and forward passwords before on a large scale, now they are becoming targeted and fast. Threat evolution is something that cannot be dealt with reactively; it must be part of infrastructure planning and design. Today, all attention is focused on Microsoft. The world's favorite target has fallen victim to a password-stealing virus that got a hold of passwords that can access the source code to upcoming versions of Windows and Office. It is unclear whether or not the perpetrators were able to use the passwords to actually access and manipulate the source code, however if the source code was accessed two questions remain. 1. Was the code manipulated in some way that could open the door for later attacks or other problems? Microsoft claims no, the code has maintained it's integrity. Other than to trust Microsoft's word we may never know the answer. 2. Does the ability for a criminal group to view the source code destroy the security by obscurity that is key to so many commercial software products? In the open source community, numerous hackers examine products and contribute solutions to flaws in the products. In the commercial world, many companies rely on their development team to produce secure code and then keep the source code secret to not only protect their intellectual property, but also to minimize potential attacks that could be launched against the product. In this case, the loss of security by obscurity could result in a criminal having intimate knowledge of the product development cycle to be able to develop targeted attacks on future Microsoft products. Regardless of the quality of Microsoft products, the mere fact that the company was able to recognize that this incident occurred is unfortunately unique. Many corporations might never know this had happened to them. In fact the ability to isolate the incident to specific networks or machine is quite difficult in many environments. The other interesting thing going on here is the Trojan horse attack. These attacks have been discussed for several years now and the current solution has been to use content filtering software to detect the attack. If you are one of the world's favorite targets, the Trojan horse writer will write the attack specifically at you. By the time the anti-virus companies know about the Trojan horse and are able to detect and stop it, it's too late. Unfortunately, it has taken a high profile incident like this for awareness to spread. One solution is to seperate general purpose computing such as internet surfing and email from sensitive computing such as accessing source code or controlling IT infrastructure. This is what the military does. They run 2 networks that are physically isolated from each other. A less expensive solution is to keep all executable content from reaching workstations such as executable programs, active HTML content, or documents that contain macros. This is difficult to acheive in reality so physical seperation is the the only way to be sure you are secure. The Wall Street Journal broke this story and pretty much everybody is currently running it. Look for more information and speculation to filter out through the rest of the day.

• Wall Street Journal via MSNBC
• Reuters
• CNNfn
• CNET
• Newsbytes
• AP via ABC News
• Reuters via Excite re: Microsoft Stock Price
• http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.hll w.qaz.a.html
• F-Secure's Qaz description via datafellows.com

The links is just wrong - if you go on Reuters site, you can use their direct link to the article (it's in "Science" section. Url is: http://www.reuters.com/home.jhtml.

Go to http://www.reuters.com/news.jhtml ?ty pe=science and click on the link

The actual story is here

This is stretching, but while we're on the topic of domain disputes, on that news page, note the one story on the left column : eToys posting a net loss of $45.36 million in Q1.

Kinda makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, eh? =)

AOL.com, News.com, and MSN.com -- and all the rest (including Slashdot) are just barking dogs chasing their wheels?

There's also the online version of most major papers; I go to The New York Times a lot more frequently than I do any of the ones you've mentioned, and they tend to have more credibility (with me at least). There's also syndicates like the Associated Press and Reuters which allow just about anyone to compete with the bigger news sites, at least on some level.

This article from Reuters has a Sun spokesman named Marco Boerries stating that the "open source" release of StarOffice will be based on StarOffice 6.0, and will occur on October 13th.

I'm totally behind you guys. If there's anything that we as readers can do, just post it.

I think that we readers can certainly help by calling attention to this. I'm begging everyone to send e-mail to Microsoft, the press, and representation in Congress. While the folks at Andover are waging the war on the legal front, we can get a lot accomplished using our power as consumers. Let people know that you're angry. Don't just sit there and stew about it.

Here are some great places to start:
contact@microsoft.com
Reuter's News Agency
Associated Press
ZDNet
New York Times
Tech Section of MSNBC

Also find out who your representatives in Congress are and tell them what you think about Microsoft's bending of the law.

Look closely, thats a wire story. We need to bitch at Reuters too. http://www.reuters.com/contacts/gencontact.htm

The interesting questions are: will it be compatible to the 3Com - so the 3Com applications can run?
According to this report from Reuters, it licenses the PalmOS and is seen by 3Com as a way to sell more of its Palm software.