Free Republic

Orrin Hatch, software pirate? Check your software and digital media licenses, folks, because some day you might just have to fend off The Computer Terminator, dream-child of Senator Orrin Hatch. WASHINGTON POST: Hatch Takes Aim at Illegal Downloading The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet. The surprise remarks by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during a hearing on copyright abuses represent a dramatic escalation in the frustrating battle by industry executives and lawmakers in Washington against illegal music downloads. During...

NEW YORK (AFP) - The US state of West Virginia has dropped its appeal against an antitrust settlement between the US government and software giant Microsoft, the company said in a statement. The decision leaves only the state of Massachusetts pursuing a case against the computer software giant. "We are pleased to resolve our legal differences with the State of West Virginia," Microsoft said. "Today's announcement represents another step in Microsoft's efforts to resolve the legal issues facing us so that we can focus on innovation and customer needs." In November, a federal judge approved a settlement between Microsoft and...

New Software to Unravel Stasi Puzzle   The orderly habits of communist bureaucrats have made it easier for new technology to uncover secrets they sought to destroy.   Researchers at Berlin's prestigious Frauenhofer Institute are programming software that will piece together documents destroyed by East German secret police workers as the sun set on the communist era. Everyone knows that if you really want no-one to discover your secrets, the trick is to completely destroy all the evidence. But this concept appears to have been lost on the workers at East Germany's secret police agency, the Stasi, during the...

Everyone in the room, from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, was beaming at last week's announcement. The news was that Asia's largest computer consultant has become a deep-pocket partner of the University at Buffalo. Under an agreement signed Monday, Tata Consultancy Services of India will partner with local researchers and help transform their discoveries into money-making products. Products mean jobs, the strongly desired byproduct of Buffalo's $140 million Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics. But jobs where? Advocates say the Indian company's capital and business links will mean economic spin-off benefits in Western New York and abroad....

<p>PLEASANTON -- PeopleSoft Inc., whose software is used to process payroll and track inventory, will shift some consulting work to India to lower the costs of customizing programs for clients. Pleasanton-based PeopleSoft is working with Hexaware Technologies Ltd., an Indian consulting company, to open an office in Bangalore in June. Hexaware consultants will configure PeopleSoft programs for customers' specific needs, said Bill Henry, a PeopleSoft vice president of strategy and marketing.</p>

CIA-Funded Software To Scour For Clues WASHINGTON - The CIA is bankrolling efforts to improve technology designed to scour millions of digital photos or video clips for particular cars or street signs or even, some day, human faces. The innovative software from fledgling PiXlogic LLC of Los Altos, Calif., promises to help analysts make better use of the Central Intelligence Agency's enormous electronic archives. Analysts also could be alerted when a helicopter or other targeted item appears in a live video broadcast. PiXlogic is set to announce that the CIA's venture-capital organization, In-Q-Tel, has invested an unspecified amount to help...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oracle Corp., the world's No. 2 software maker, said on Friday it offered to buy rival PeopleSoft Inc. for $5.1 billion, a move designed to bolster its flagging position in business software programs. The deal signals the growing readiness by software executives to consolidate the struggling sector as corporate spending on technology has waned amid the slumping economy. Oracle said it would bypass management and go directly to shareholders on Monday with a cash offer of $16 a share, a 6 percent premium over PeopleSoft's closing price of $15.11 in Thursday's Nasdaq trading. PeopleSoft shares rose...

IT DOES not have the high-street resonance of a Nike, a Pepsi or a Windows. In its unglamorous but lucrative niche in the bank back office, however, FLEXCUBE is the brand of choice. According to rankings published in March by International Banking Systems, a trade journal, it is in fact the world's best-selling banking-software product. Its owner, i-flex solutions of Bangalore, is one of India's software success stories. Some even argue that it points the way forward for the whole industry: let it emerge from the shadows where Indian techno-coolies beaver away writing code that is sold in an American...

WASHINGTON - A new computer program can determine the sex of an author by detecting subtle differences in the words men and women prefer to use. For instance, female writers tend to choose grammatical terms that apply to personal relationships, such as "for" and "with," more frequently than men do. "Women have a more interactive style," said Shlomo Argamon, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who developed the program. "They want to create a relationship between the writer and the reader." Men, on the other hand, use more numbers, adjectives and determiners - words such...

A brace of Microsoft security vulns pose risks for both home users and corporates. The more serious problem, involving Microsoft's virtual machine (Microsoft VM), which enables Java programs to run on Microsoft Windows, provides a mechanism for attackers to run amok on Windows PCs. Microsoft has released a fix designed to address the problem, which affects users of Windows 98, NT 4, Windows 2000, XP and Windows Me. Attacks including "changing data, loading and running programs, and reformatting the hard disk", might be possible, according to the low-fat version of Microsoft's alert. Well if that doesn't get consumers patching, what...

WASHINGTON--The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday lost its first attempt to challenge a controversial 1998 copyright law. In a strongly worded decision, a federal judge in Boston dismissed a lawsuit aimed at defanging part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The ACLU's suit, filed against filtering-software company N2H2 last July, claims the law unconstitutionally interferes with researchers' ability to investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of Internet filtering software."There is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that...outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted property from an invasive and destructive trespass," U.S. District Judge Richard Sterns wrote. Sterns' ruling dealt a sore...

In fiscal 2000 Peregrine reported losses of $18 million. Yesterday, the number was revised to $217 million. In fiscal 2001, the company claimed losses of $852 million. Now, Peregrine says that number was really $1.84 billion. In the first three quarters of fiscal 2002, Peregrine claimed losses of $677 million. Yesterday, it revised the number to show losses of $2.03 billion. Peregrine Systems has finally tallied up the extent of its massive accounting fraud. The San Diego software maker acknowledged yesterday that the scope of the fraud is more than twice as large as it reported last summer, shortly before...

A leading civic group is gearing to take legal action against Microsoft, the creator of the computer software blamed for the disastrous Internet crash last month. People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) said it is considering filing a class action suit against the software giant for the ``Slammer'' worm which paralyzed the country?s Internet servers on Jan. 25 by unleashing huge volumes of Internet traffic. The worm was traced to a widely known flaw in Microsoft's SQL software, a Web server application. The group said it plans to build its case on a ``product liability law?? passed last July that...

A New York court has ruled that Network Associates, a maker of popular antivirus and computer security software, may not require people who buy the software to get permission from the company before publishing reviews of its products. The decision, which the company has vowed to appeal, could carry a penalty in the millions of dollars, according to Ken Dreifach, chief of the Internet bureau of the office of the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer. Last spring, Mr. Spitzer sued Network Associates, which has its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., asserting that the company's software included an unenforceable...

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Bought the latest whiz-bang personal computer, but don't know what to do with your older, fully functional PC? One option would be to try breathing new life into it with Linux (news - web sites), the software standard that is presenting itself as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Windows operating system. With better stability, security and pricing in a desktop operating system with a look-and-feel similar to Windows, Linux advocates say they are getting ready to take on Microsoft, which dominates the desktop market. Since Linux is free to be copied and modified, unlike...

We are upgrading our small business network (4 computers running Windows ME - Yuck) and are wondering what the functional difference is between XP Home Edition and XP Pro? Is XP Pro worth the extra money?We run a few applications in Access97 and need to keep that compatability. Any issues there? I use the Home Edition of XP on this computer and it rarely misses a beat. Will it hold up in a small business enviroment? Thanks AR

Dec. 6 — FBI and Customs agents on Friday raided a Quincy, Mass., software company that has done business with dozens of government agencies and Fortune 500 companies, attempting to determine whether the company is partly owned by a Saudi businessman who U.S. officials believe is a financier for the al-Qaida terrorism network, NBC News has learned. The company’s client list includes the FBI, NATO, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Air Force, the Naval Air Serices Command, the Department of Energy, the IRS, the Postal Service and the House of Representatives. SOURCES FAMILIAR with the raid, who spoke on...

The Japanese government is contemplating to replace Microsoft Windows, used in much of its computer networks, with another operating system to bolster security. According to the local newspaper Asahi Shimbun, the planned move came in the wake of recent event of leakage of secure data from Japan's military network. Instead the government is looking the possibility of adopting open source programs like Linux. Reuters TOKYO: The Japanese government will consider replacing Microsoft Corp's Windows, used in much of its computer networks, with another operating system to bolster security, a newspaper said on Saturday. The safety of computer networks is under...

Petition to Abolish the — H–1B — Updated 05 Oct 2002   Petition to   Abolish the H-1B Visa Program   Over the past ten years,       hundreds of thousands of American computer programmers           scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals               have been laid off by their employers,                   many to see their jobs replaced by foreign labor.   If you are among them,       or care about the state of American science and technology      ...

On any regular day I will go to Drudge then come to FreeRepublic, I've been doing this for years now. Lately, when I move from one to the other I get a full screen pop-up taking me to a site called WWW.SpyOnYou.com. It always seems to occur after I click on my link to FR while on Drudge or vice versa. I've searched for cookies and sure enough I find one - then I delete it - then later the popup occurs again - and the cookie is back. Any ideas on how to skip this part of my internet...