Tuesday, May 2

The US Supreme Court has let stand a lower court decision that online services are not responsible for email or message board content. The case involved an impostor who sent threatening messages through Prodigy in another person's name. The Prodigy suit has been winding its way through lower courts for six years, and has long provided a precedent for BBS operators, online services and ISPs. The suit reaffirms their legal status as common carriers, similar to telephone and telegraph providers.

Last month engineer Ken Segler learned that a $99 Netpliance could be turned into a PC by rolling a custom cable and installing an ordinary IDE hard drive. The latest object of his talent is CompUSA's $49 WebSurfer. The low-cost appliances are so cheap because the prices are subsidized by the vendor, who expects to make up the difference in monthly Internet service fees, in a classic case of giving away the razors and charging for the blades. In the case of the WebSurfer, stores didn't always require the customer to sign a service agreement, though that appears to be changing as news of the hack spreads. Some stores are selling the device for $199 without a service agreement.

Big bandwidth

iMagicTV provides TV programming and high speed Internet access over a DSL connection. The system is being introduced in Canada and the UK.

Excite@Home may sue Pacific Bell because the phone company's TV ads claim cable modems are subject to slowdowns due to shared bandwidth. The ads promote Pac Bell's DSL service. Excite@Home recently inked a deal to offer DSL service with partner RhythmsNetConnections.

As of Monday Juno now offers DSL in 22 US cities. Unlike the company's email service, the DSL service isn't free. The charge is $50 per month, though Juno is enticing new users with a $200 rebate on modem and installation fees. Covad Communications is provisioning Juno's DSL service.

Covad recently announced a line-sharing agreement with BellSouth that will help BellSouth bring DSL service to its nine-state service area.

EarthLink is waiving DSL setup fees to attract new users.

Itsy bitsy bandwidth

A startup company called Savos is attempting to bring Internet radio to cell phones and PDAs. Better get lots of minutes with your plan.

Atom Films will offer its short films for Palm devices and Microsoft Pocket PCs.

Computer security and privacy

Predictive Networks is raising privacy concerns. The company plans to track web users' movements to target advertising. Predictive expects users to voluntarily submit to being tracked in exchange for subsidized Internet service.

A new program called Mstream can implement Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using fewer computers than previous software. DDoS attacks brought down Yahoo!, eBay and other sites in February.

Convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick's parole officer has informed him that guest lectures violate the terms of his parole.

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Friday, Cinco De Mayo

The 56K.COM Message Boards have been fixed. To improve performance and prevent further problems, message threads in which the latest message is more than 60 days old (90 days for low-volume forums) have been pruned. Saturday update: Several people wrote that there were still problems with the registration process and emailing of forgotten passwords. I fixed those problems on Saturday. Sunday update - Fixed more problems on Sunday caused by Saturday's fixes. - Leslie

Keen as mustard technology

British Telecom scientists have developed a theft-deterrent system for TVs and other electronics. When first plugged in, the TV sends its serial number through your electrical system to the home's control center. The control center then uses a modem to dial into a central registration location, which records your phone number and the device's unique serial number. If the device is stolen (or the power goes off) the device loses its registration data and must dial in again, but the thief will lack your control center. Even if he didn't, the phone number will be different, so the device won't be able to register itself. What's more, if the thief tries to register the device, the police will be given the phone number where the bogus registration attempt took place.

The US military is no longer scrambling GPS signals. In the past the military has introduced errors into the Global Positioning System so that the public at large and foreign countries didn't have telemetry of the same accuracy as the US armed forces. The move should enhance the popularity of GPS and lead to new uses. BMW already uses a combination of cell phones and GPS to direct emergency personnel to an accident when the airbag deploys.

Love bug

Yesterday saw one of the largest virus outbreaks ever. The ILOVEYOU worm has already spread to half again as many computers as the Melissa virus. ILOVEYOU appears as an email with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and a Visual Basic attachment named LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs.

When the attachment is opened or viewed in Outlook's preview pane the worm mails itself to everyone in the victim's Outlook address book. Lovebug then deletes files of certain types - including JPEG, Java and Visual Basic scripts - on local and networked drives, so web developers should be especially careful. MP3 and MP2 files are hidden, and replaced by copies of the worm with the same name as the original files.

Variants of the worm have already been reported, with subject lines like "Very Funny" and "Joke."

The worm appears to have originated in the Philippines. Philippine authorities are cooperating with the FBI to track down the author, and signs point to a 23 year old man named from Pandacan, a suburb of Manila, who goes by the name of Spyder.

To stay abreast of this and similar security announcements, consider joining the CERT mailing list, a low-volume list of the most important announcements. CSee CERTs announcement of the Love Letter Worm.

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