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After watching Microsoft stock fall despite this year's tech rally, Microsoft shareholders sharply questioned Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer during the company's annual meeting yesterday in Bellevue. Investors in general are more skeptical after recent corporate scandals and, after three relatively weak years for Microsoft's stock, there were few cheers from the crowd of 1,250 at Meydenbauer Center. Shareholders did not go so far as to throw out any board members, all of whom were re-elected yesterday, and they approved changes to the stock-option plan that Ballmer proposed in July. But they asked when the company will...

Microsoft placed a $250,000 bounty on the respective heads of the MSBlaster and So.Big virus writers as part of a $5 million program it launched here on Wednesday with the FBI, Secret Service and Interpol to fight cybercrime. The reward program, sponsored by Microsoft and backed by those law enforcement agencies, represents the first major partnership between the private sector and government officials to hunt down, capture and prosecute hackers and virus writers.At a press conference today at the National Press Club in Washington, Microsoft's top attorney pledged to press prosecution of suspected virus writers and reward those who turn...

Suspect Admits 48 Seattle-Area Killings (AP) Gary Ridgway in court on Wednesday November 5, 2003 in the King County Courthouse in Seattle... Full Image SEATTLE (AP) - Gary Ridgway, the former truck painter long suspected of being the Green River Killer, admitted in court Wednesday to 48 murders. "I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud by prosecutors. "I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," Ridgway said in the statement. Some relatives of victims wept quietly in the courtroom....

Video Games Are Addictive as Work - Scientists Some evidence exists that games stimulate the same areas in the brain as alcohol and other drugs, psychologists, sociologists and others were told at the world's first interdisciplinary games conference here. But unlike the addictive substances, there is no medicine to deal with compulsive gaming behavior, they heard. "Is (the popular online game) Everquest addictive? Well, it's no more addictive than school or work. The time invested in those also make them addictive," said Florence Chee, a research student at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Scientific interest in the multibillion dollar computer...

The body of the note says, "Will meet tonight as we agreed, because on Wednesday I don't think I'll make it, so don't be late. And yes, by the way here is the file you asked for. It's all written there. See you. blkbsxos" Attached to the note is a file "readnow.zip" I have the latest Symantec definitions, but the note still got through. Is this file a virus, or a hoax?

<p>Software used by an electronic voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems has been left unprotected on a publicly available server, raising concerns about the possibility of vote tampering in future elections.</p> <p>The software, made available at ftp.jaguar.net, is stored on an FTP server owned by Jaguar Computer Systems, a firm that provides election support to a California county. The software is used for placing ballots on voting kiosks and for storing and tabulating results for the Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen system.</p>

IT forensics firm Vogon has explained how its work helped clear a man accused of storing child pornography on his computer by proving his PC was contaminated by Trojan horse infection capable of downloading illicit images onto his machine. Julian Green was arrested in October 2002 after police raided his home and found 172 indecent pictures of children on his hard drive. His solicitor, Chris Bittlestone of South Devon law firm Kitson Hutchings, called in one of Vogon International's forensic investigators, Martin Gibbs, to help.A clone of Green's hard drive was sent to Vogon International in Bicester, where it was...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Prosecutors looking to throw the book at accused computer hackers have come across a legal defense expected to become even more widespread in an era of hijacked PCs and laptops that threatens to blur the lines of personal responsibility: the computer did it. In one case that was being watched as a bellwether by computer security experts, Aaron Caffrey, 19, was acquitted earlier this month in the United Kingdom on charges of hacking into the computer system of the Houston Pilots, an independent contractor for the Port of Houston, in September 2001. Caffrey had been charged...

I have a few questions concerning IP addresses, and am fairly ignorant in these areas. I understand that I have a dynamic IP address through Bellsouth.net. Dynamic means that it changes daily. I have noticed that the first two numbers of the address never change, and that they have something to do with my geographic location. A certain website, which I will leave unamed has banned my IP address, and tells me when I try to register that the IP is banned. How can they ban my IP when it changes every day? Are they just banning the first two...

Cyber women test what's real By Jo Twist BBC News Online technology reporter Software cyberbabes, created by powerful computers, sophisticated modelling packages and active imaginations are getting extremely human-like. Rene Morel's 3D model has a very human face Virtual cyberbabes are used in advertising campaigns, hit shoot-em-up games, and the pop industry, from Lara Croft to virtual pop idols, T-Babe and Diki or DK-96. Some of the best 3D models around are currently on show at an exhibition which has just opened in London called Perfectly Real: Women in Bits and Bytes. But they raise questions about what people...

Can anyone tell me how to delete or bypass a forgotten bios password which blocks my CPU from booting.

My motherboard gave up the ghost. I purchased a Compaq E-machine, (due to cash flow issues from being underemployed!)The hard drive on the old Compaq was okay so the Comp USA tech installed it in the new machine and made it non-bootable. I know that's a "cheap" way to back up a system but the crash was unexpected!I'm trying to bring the system back to where it was before trying anything new. I was able to import the contact list into Outlook Express from my Yahoo e-mail account. Now I would like to find my received messages, (there's well over...

Alert Alert The conservative website NewsMax www.newsmax.com places spybots on any visitor to it URL site. I just installed my spybot software 10 days ago. As I travels to my favorite watering holes, suprise visiting newsmax website alarm bells indicated targetnet spybot was trying to load. Every time I visited newsmax over the last 10 days newsmax tried to load the spybot targetnet during load up of newsmax URL. If you are enraged by this spying let newsmax know.

Virtual hurricanes have appeared in computer models of the Earth's climate for the first time. The swirling storms are visible in the first results from the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan - the world's fastest supercomputer. The results, being presented at a workshop in Cambridge, UK, on Wednesday, are "really quite staggering" says Julia Slingo, Director of the Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling at the University of Reading, UK. Whereas most climate models divide the Earth into blocks measuring hundreds of kilometres across, the powerful Earth Simulator can run models with cells as small as 10 kilometres. This means that...

Artificial Development To Build Biggest Spiking Neural Network The first CCortex cluster Palo Alto - Sep 16, 2003 Artificial Development, Inc. today announced that it has completed assembly of the first functional portion of a prototype of Ccortex, a 20-billion neuron emulation of the human cortex, which it will use to build a next-generation artificial intelligence system. Artificial Development will initiate testing of Ccortex in October. The cluster being assembled at AD.com Data Center is a high-performance, parallel supercomputer, composed of 500 nodes and one thousand processors, 1.5 terabytes of RAM, and 80 terabytes of storage. The low-cost software/hardware system...

Who Killed Apple Computer? This essay has received some attention on the web, giving it an audience beyond those for whom it was written. So I think a little introduction is in order. This was written for former Apple employees, and in particular for those who worked at Apple during the same time as me, when the company grew, reached an apex in revenue, and then almost died. It's an effort to draw some lessons from that experience. It is not, despite some things you may have seen on the web, a critique of the current incarnation of Apple. But...

Gateway will cut at least 1,300 jobs as it tries to streamline its manufacturing, delivery and service operations, an effort first announced last week. On Tuesday, the Poway, Calif., company notified about 850 customer service and technical support employees that it would be eliminating their positions in a reorganization of its manufacturing system. The 850 job cuts are in addition to 450 layoffs announced last week, when Gateway made public a plan to close its PC manufacturing plant in Hampton, Va., and to outsource some PC manufacturing. The additional layoffs involve 200 customer service employees in Kansas City, Kan.,...

So there I was....diggin' into my new laptop....and noticing all the little annoying nuances that have populated my home and download directories...when I came across a couple plugin_trace files. I narrowed these down to Java creations possibly generated by browser errors (primarily netscape). So I google'd "java plugin trace and came across the following discussion which can be found here http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=226851 . The one post that struck me as odd was this one, however: (snip) The above re-assuring comments are incorrect. I too found these files appearing on my hard drive and they are indeed generated by Sun Java, however...

Help! Is it possible to print a Windows Directory in Windows 2000 Professional without using the command prompt?

Imagine I were to give you a computer and turn you loose on the internet. You could read text, see pictures, watch movies and animations, play music and enjoy interactive games. You can save these things to view them later, and share them with your friends. You can print them, burn them on CDs, edit them and modify them and create new things from pieces of old things. Most of it is free, too. You can publish things, and remain anonymous if you wish. You can indulge your curiosity in embarrassing ways and visit porn sites, pictures-of-dead-bodies sites, radical revolutionary...