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Volume 4, Issue 43 Atari Online News, Etc. October 25, 2002 Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2002 All Rights Reserved Atari Online News, Etc. A-ONE Online Magazine Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor Atari Online News, Etc. Staff Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking" Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile" Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips" Rob Mahlert -- Web site Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame" With Contributions by: Kevin Savetz Tim Conrardy To subscribe to A-ONE, change e-mail addresses, or unsubscribe, log on to our website at: www.atarinews.org and click on "Subscriptions". OR subscribe to A-ONE by sending a message to: dpj@atarinews.org and your address will be added to the distribution list. To unsubscribe from A-ONE, send the following: Unsubscribe A-ONE Please make sure that you include the same address that you used to subscribe from. To download A-ONE, set your browser bookmarks to one of the following sites: http://people.delphiforums.com/dpj/a-one.htm http://www.icwhen.com/aone/ http://a1mag.atari.org Now available: http://www.atarinews.org Visit the Atari Advantage Forum on Delphi! http://forums.delphiforums.com/atari/ =~=~=~= A-ONE #0443 10/25/02 ~ Lobby Seeks Spam Laws! ~ People Are Talking! ~ Royalties Extension! ~ E-mail Scam On Yahoo! ~ New Version of Office! ~ ARAnyM Update News! ~ Man Fined For Spamming ~ OLGA Finds New Support ~ Google Missing Sites! ~ MSN Locks Fees, Pop-Ups~ New Ways To Can Spam! ~ New Pulsar Version! -* Massive Web Attack Is Probed *- -* CodeHead's MIDI Software Available! *- -* AOL Launches Kids' Safety Buddy Program! *- =~=~=~= ->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!" """""""""""""""""""""""""" I always thought that there were four seasons, but it appears that I may have been taught incorrectly! Somehow, fall is missing this year. Although the leaves appear to be changing colors, it's downright cold out there; and, we even had snow this week! Last I checked, this was still October! I hope that this doesn't mean I've thrown my last steak on the barbecue this year! I'm not even ready to think about getting the snow-thrower ready for winter and bringing in the patio furniture. I've probably mentioned this in the past once or twice, but I'll do it again this week. One of my biggest pet peeves is telemarketing. Wouldn't I be happy if someone created a telemarketer hunting season! Naturally, it would have to be legalized! Or, if when we got one of these calls, we could push a button and somehow not only would our number be deleted from that telemarketing database, but a small firecracker or something blew up the caller's phoneset! You know, something like the traditional jokester's version of the firecracker load in the cigar routine! After putting this week's issue together, it was apparent that an issue that ranks right up there with telemarketing continues to make the technology/internet headlines: e-mail spam. I mean really, are there people out there who actually believe that they've won a cruise on a weekly basis? Or that they can make millions that easily? Or that the deal of a century won't end up costing them their life's savings? And the sex sites, the viagara offers, and every other con game that you can imagine! Do these spammers really believe that they have the right to intrude like this because there are people who will "take advantage" of these "wonderful" offers being made to them? If people do, fine. But at least give the rest of us the opportunity to "opt out" of these offers and never bother us again! And if they don't fine the hell out of them! Finally, according to one of the articles in this week's issue, an Oregon man has been fined for e-mail spam! Hurray! We need more of that. Thankfully, another of my pet peeves - Jehovah's Witnesses - hasn't intruded into my life electronically. I'm sure they'll find a way to do that eventually! Until next time... =~=~=~= New on TAMW: CodeHead MIDI Software! Hi All NEW ON TAMW: The CODEHEAD MIDI Software is now released: http://tamw.atari-users.net/codehead.htm This includes GenPatch, MidiSpy and MIDI Max. Thanks for all those involved with the release! ALSO: General Midi (GM) compatible instrument definition file for the Atari Mozart's Dice program. Created by Martin Tarenskeen. http://tamw.atari-users.net/mozart.htm ENJOY! Tim OLGA Finds New Maintainer Originally written by Thomas Much, OLGA has offered linking of objects under GEM for any applications supporting the protocol. However, since the original programmer moved on to work with other platforms, OLGA has not been updated since back in 1998. This might be about to change now, since Dutch Programmer Henk Robbers (XaAES, TT-Digger) has expressed that he wishes to maintain future versions of OLGA. http://members.ams.chello.nl/h.robbers/Home.html ARAnyM 0.6.8 Released Petr Stehlik has announced: New version of Aranym, the not yet well known Atari/TOS compatible, completely free, high power virtual machine aiming at fulfilling all needs of serious Atari users has been released. This new version is working on Mac OS X and contains a small IKBD fix that allows running the GFA Basic. All info, source and binary packages for most favorite operating systems are (or soon will be) available at the URL below. Also please let me clear up the smoke that appeared after I used a "TOS clone" title for aranym last time. After a careful analysis by a group of dedicated people in comp.sys.atari.st we have found out that neither Aranym, Milan, Medusa, Hades nor any other non-Atari brand machine is a "TOS clone". The only TOS clone known today is EmuTOS, which is used as the boot heart of our aranym, BTW. All the machines that run TOS can safely be called TOS machines and so Hades, Milan and Aranym are all TOS machines (with the noticeable exception that Aranym is a virtual machine, meaning that it can run on virtually any hardware :-) http://aranym.atari.org New on TAMW: PULSAR ver 2! Hi All Looks like lots of releases this month. Neil Wakeling and I have been beta testing a new version of PULSAR, so it is now in version 2. Lots of new features. It's amazing we are still coding for our platform! Neil has put in over 30-40 hours on this new version. Please visit my newly created page and help yourself to the new PULSAR: the Analog Sequencer Simulator! http://tamw.atari-users.net/pulsar.htm Tim Conrardy Tims Atari MIDI World http://tamw.atari-users.net =~=~=~= PEOPLE ARE TALKING compiled by Joe Mirando joe@atarinews.org Hidi ho friends and neighbors. Time for "spring ahead, fall back" this weekend. I love this time of year! Mornings are crisp and bracing here in the northeast at this time of the year. I'm not what anyone would consider a morning person, so that chilly air wakes me up good and fast. It's not the same once it gets really cold and the snow hits the ground. By then it's too cold. During the springtime you're going from cold weather to warm weather. There's nothing "bracing" about that. Going from spring to summer is worse yet. Yep, autumn is just about right for me. Of course, I don't have to worry about raking leaves or any of the other bits of yard work that need to be done... my landlord takes care of that. I'm free to do nothing more than wake up in the morning and get hit in the face with that cool, crisp air and wake up. I think that too many people these days are just plain too busy to enjoy simple things like a chilly morning, but when you come right down to it, that's really all there is... simple things. Things only look complicated because we tend to lump everything together to try to save time. Yeah, right. How often does THAT work? I find that, if you take a complex job and break it up into its simplest parts, it's really not as difficult as it seems. But no one thinks about that anymore. It's always "more, faster, cheaper" and no one asks about what it takes to get things done as long as they do get done. Well, I'm going to step down off my soapbox now, but the next time you come upon a complex problem, think about what I said about breaking it down. I'm not the guy who came up with the idea, just the guy who reminded you about it. Now let's get to the news, hints, tips, and info available from the UseNet. From the comp.sys.atari.st NewsGroup ============================== 'Klaas' asks about using an IDE hard drive on a TT: "Does anyone know how i can connect an IDE device to my TT ? I want to have more space for storing my files. I already tried an old Iomega SCSI Jaz drive, but it messed up everything." Dr. Uwe Seimet tells Klaas: "There is no way to connect IDE drives to the TT. Any SCSI drive will work, however, because the TT has a standard 8 bit SCSI bus. JAZ drives are used by quite a lot of TT owners, there are no known issues with them." 'BR' asks about recovering data from a sick hard drive: "My hard disk , that means at least one partition of my 10-year old 48MB Seagate drive is defective.While copying , there was a read write error , computer crashed and the FAT of this partition has been destroyed. Undelete utilities won't work , I think sectors of the FAT are bad. Most of the data was plain ASCII text , so it must be somewhere on the HD , even if some of the sectors are defective it must be possible to recover some of the data. What I need now is some kind of disk monitor. I have several ones that only support floppy disks and with these it was always possible to recover data from a floppy disk. But they don't work with hard disks. Or [how about] a program which allows me to save certain sectors to one file. There were about 200 ASCII files, each maybe 1Kb, not much, maybe 200Kb of a 12Mb Partition." Peter West tells BR: "KnifeST should be able to do that. If the files are only 1kB, they won't be fragmented. Knife has a 'build' feature - preferably on a floppy in your case. Don't know where you can get it - it was commercial rom HiSoft but has featured on a cover disk. It's no good with large partitions, but should be OK with your 48 Meg one. But it can take quite some time, as you have to decide whether the next cluster belongs to what you already have when the files are over a cluster long." James Haslam asks about sites that cause CAB to crash: "I'm having a problem getting into a particular site, using Cab 2.7c with Dan Ackerman's OVL v1.4401 (via StinG v1.26). I keep getting a Basic Error report which then crashes Cab completely. I have MagiC v6.01 on my Falcon, it only affects Cab and MagiC keeps on going. I have tried shutting down and restarting to no avail. The site is one I have used many times fine with Cab. It is the Dreambook Management login page (Dreambook is a Guestbook site, which I use with my website). Can someone have a look with their setup, especially if you use a similar setup to mine? This is the URL I'm trying: http://manage.dreambook.com/index.cgi?Nscmd=Nlogout " Pascal Ricard tells James: "Same problem here (Cab 2.8). Looking with IE on the PC, I can see that the first <html> tag is missing on this page." Edward Baiz adds: "Yes, I tried to access it also and Cab 2.8 crashed. However when I used the Cab.ovl file for MagicNet, Cab did not crash, but told me that the file cannot be found. This usually means the site has updated their HTML source code to a point where Cab cannot interpret it. Cab either needs to upgraded or else Dan needs to release another OVL file. Of course when Highwire comes out, it will probably load the above site with no problems." Martin Tarenskeen jumps in and adds: "I have tried with CAB 2.8 and CAB.OVL 1.8604 with SSL support for MiNTnet. I also tried with lynx_ssl for MiNTnet. Both seemed to work fine. I'm seeing a connection being made to a https://... type of URL. I think https means that SSL support is needed to connect ?" Greg Goodwin asks about a cartridge that caught his interest: "Saw an add for a cartridge that would break the source code of any ST program. I was thinking if so, this would be helpful in porting ST games to the Atari Jaguar. But I digress, can anyone tell me about this? Does anyone have one to sell?" Steve Sweet tells Greg: "I'd have thought that TT-Digger would do that, its a powerful software application. http://digger.atari.org/ " Jon Cumberbatch asks about teaching a German TT to speak English: "Can anybody help me? I have just bought an Atari TT and a Mega STE but they are German models, so I think TOS/GEM will be in German and the keyboard won't be QWERTY. Does anybody know how to go about converting to English?" Steve Sweet tells Jon: "Bypass TOS altogether by using Magic, you get Multitasking as a bonus. It will also speed up that TT." Greg Goodwin adds: "There are a couple of pieces of software for the ST that remap the keyboard (the silk screening on the keys will still be wrong, of course!). Try ger2eng.prg and keyb_sys.lzh, both of which should be in your email by the time you read this." Peter Schneider adds his thoughts: "But both "solutions" will show the disadvantage that the characters shown on the keyboard won't match the characters you type. I think the best is to replace both the keyboard _and_ the eproms." Hallvard Tangeraas asks about MagicMac upgrades: "I've just got myself a new Mac (PowerMac 9600 with a G3 processor upgrade), to replace my good old Quadra 840av (68040 processor). I've been using MagiCMac on the Quadra, but since it's an old version (2.2.1. I think) it doesn't work on anything higher than MacOS 7.x, so I've had two operating systems installed on the Mac: 8.1 and 7.6.1. Now, with the new PowerMac I'm having trouble installing 7.6.1. for some reason -each time I try, the installation program crashes, so perhaps it won't work. Someone told me that I'd probably need a minimum of MacOS 8 on a G3 equipped Mac, so if that's the case (I'm currently using MacOS 9.1. on it) I'll have to upgrade MagiCMac which I was hoping to avoid (I don't use it that much and really don't want to spend much more money on it)... but in case I do have to upgrade, does anyone know how much it'll cost to upgrade from my current version to something that works with MacOS 9.x?" Jo Vandeweghe tells Hallvard: "If you already own a previous version not so much I think ...... just look at the ASH page: http://www.ash-software.de/atari/ But you must know it's also possible to run OSX on your machine with a minimum of hassle installing XPostFacto which will allow your "old" computer to run the new system ...... Only you must have a compatible graphic card like an ATI Radeon or older 128 one. It already exist an OS X version of MagiCMac ...... BUT don't expect to run any musical application using MIDI interface ........ a pity but that's all you won't be able to use. MagiCMac is great at using Calamus and everything else .......... If you need more information let's talk I'm using a 8600 which is the same computer than yours excepting I only have 3 PCI slots and I have Audio + Video Inputs and Outputs that the 9600 don't. " Didier Mequignon tells Jo: "There is just a little problem... this version is 7 or 10 times slower than the version under MacOS 9.x. For example it's not enough for play divx files. Under MacOS X now Aranym seems a better solution." Paul Williamson asks about emulators, clones, what-have-you: "There's been a lot of postings recently on emulators, clones etc. As I understand it there is no way to run any of the dongle protected programmes such as Cubase with an emulator. The dongle port and built in MIDI interface is an important feature of the Atari. My Hades has a card which takes the dongles and Cubase runs a treat on it (not sure about Cubase Audio, but I think it is possible at a price). To me no emulator can be considered an "Atari" unless it fulfils the basic functions of an Atari. Can it be done with Aranym ? Will it be possible on the Coldfire ? (I do hope so)." Citrad Fertr tells Paul: "There are two possible ways how to use dongle keys on machines without ROM port. First way is to use an ISA/PCI/VME ROM port adaptor. Second way is to simulate the dongle key (e.g. grab it into binary file if it's a kind of (E)(P)ROM and then map this file ROM port memory area). And, of course, third possibility is to modify a program itself to be able to work without dongle key (read: use a cracked version)." Well folks, that's it for this time around. I know it's short, but there must me more people like me out there who are taking the time to enjoy the cool weather. Tune in again next week, same time, same station, and be ready to listen to what they are saying when... PEOPLE ARE TALKING =~=~=~= ->In This Week's Gaming Section - Nintendo Faces Antitrust Suit! """"""""""""""""""""""""""""" French Game Makers Face Huge Debts! =~=~=~= ->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News! """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Nintendo Faces EU Antitrust Fine Next Week European antitrust regulators next week will fine Japanese video game maker Nintendo and a number of its distributors for sales practices it employed in the mid-1990s, EU Commission sources told Reuters. Nintendo Co. Ltd. was accused in 2000 of collaborating with distributors to limit cross-border flow of its products in an effort to raise wholesale prices. The EU is expected to take up the matter next week, slapping the world's No. 2 video game maker with a fine. The Nintendo settlement is on the commission agenda for Wednesday, EU sources said. "A formal decision has not yet been received from the European Commission. However, we are aware that a decision is imminent," a Nintendo spokesman in London said. The size of the fine could not be confirmed. A spokesman for Nintendo of America confirmed that Nintendo had already set aside funds to deal with the fine. In 2000, the European Commission said it believed Nintendo and seven of its distributors participated in a "cartel-like" arrangement with the aim of partitioning the market and inflating wholesale prices for its consoles and games. Nintendo has cooperated with the EU from the outset of the investigation, which dates back to 1995. Nintendo no longer operates its European retail channel in this manner. Shares in Nintendo, which earlier this month cut its hardware shipment forecast for 2002/03, have been in a tailspin, down 19 percent this month. It closed up 2.6 percent on Friday at 11,350 yen in Tokyo. Demand for Nintendo's premier product, the GameCube, has tailed off lately in the crucial Japanese and German markets. Still, the company expects to ship 3 million GameCubes to European resellers by year-end. French Video Games Makers Must Zero in on Debt French video games makers are in a tight spot having zapped their cash in recent years and borrowed heavily to fund expansion in a consolidating industry. Analysts said that risks tied to Infogrames' hefty debt helped to knock some 80 percent off its share price this year, and will continue to weigh unless refinancing solutions are found. But its smaller domestic peer, Ubi Soft, is under less strain with a gearing of 50 percent, against a whopping 255 percent for Infogrames. But even it could face some refinancing snags further down the line, analysts said. "Debt is Infogrames' key problem and it is urgent to find a solution," said OddoPinatton analyst Gregory Ramirez. "Ubi Soft is under less pressure, but cash generation remains a problem and could threaten its ability to reimburse its convertible bonds in 2006," he said. Investors mostly worry about how Infogrames, Europe's largest video games maker, can repay its 537 million euro-debt without resorting to financing solutions that could hurt its shareholders. Some 80 percent of Infogrames's debt is made up of convertible bonds, with bonds worth 125 million euros expiring on July 1, 2004, and bonds for 309 million due on July 1, 2005. Separately, Infogrames also faces short-term working capital requirements tied to the delivery of its games during the crucial Christmas season, analysts said. Infogrames has made short-term cash generation a priority, hoping to achieve this through 20 percent sales growth and an annual cost savings program in Europe of 25 million euros. "Only the capacity to generate very significantly positive cash flows before the July 1, 2004 (bond) expiry could save the group," said CIC Securities analyst Laurent Ducoin. In fact most analysts doubt free cash flow generation alone can match Infograme's debt. "Cash flow generation will not be enough to meet the 2004-05 deadlines," said SG Cowen analyst Jean-Patrick Mousset in a recent research note. He estimated Infogrames would be cash flow negative by 39 million euros in fiscal year 2002/03, positive by just 21 million in 2003/04 and by 39 million euros in 2004/05. "For Infogrames the optimistic scenario is internal cash flow generation with video games selling well in the United States to pay back debt, but with high R&D and marketing costs that's very unlikely," said one sector analyst. Analysts said there were still a number of other possibilities for Infogrames to reduce its debt. It could restructure a portion of its debt as it did back in December, but to do that it must also demonstrate its capacity to be profitable so as to regain bankers' confidence after a series of profit warnings dented management's credibility. Infogrames could also resort to a capital boost -- though it has repeatedly denied having such plans as the solution would be dilutive to shareholders -- or refinance outstanding bonds by a new issue or renegotiate loans with banks. "But given market conditions and risk aversion, the road to financial markets and bankers looks shut," said another analyst. Infogrames could also turn for help to an outside company like a console producer, an independent software publisher or a financial institution or buy back its bonds in the market as they trade well below book value or sell its treasury stock. Another solution would be selling assets like development studios, franchises or licenses. Analysts also say Infogrames could be taken over by a rival given its low valuation, although it has repeatedly stated it wanted to remain independent. "Infogrames could be bought by a rival company but this would mean buying a lot of debt. It may be better for some to let it go bankrupt and then buy some of its assets," said one sector analyst. Ubi Soft also has less debt than Infogrames and more time to buy it back. It has a strong catalog of quality games and its management has a better image with investors, but it may still find it hard to repay its debt, analysts said. Gross financial debt stood at 228 million euros at end March 2002 and was mainly made up of 2005 and 2006 convertible bonds worth some 150 million euros. "After Christmas 2004 and a possible downturn in the market cycle, refinancing may be more difficult. The main issue is, can they create enough cash?," said OddoPinatton Gregory Ramirez. SG Cowen estimated in a recent research note that Ubi Soft would generate only five million euros in available cash during the 2002/07 period. "If Ubi Soft cannot reimburse the 150 million euros in 2005 and 2006 convertible bonds on its own, alternative ways must be considered," the note said. Because its convertible bonds offer a large discount to reimbursement price, Ubi Soft could buy them back through a debt loan or issue new shares against the bonds, analysts say. Ubi Soft recently bought back 24 percent of its 2006 convertible bonds at 61 percent of their balance sheet value. Other solutions range from attracting new shareholders to raising its capital, but market conditions are hardly ideal. =~=~=~= A-ONE's Headline News The Latest in Computer Technology News Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson FBI Seeks to Trace Internet Attack The White House sought Wednesday to allay concerns about an unusual attack this week against the 13 computer servers that manage global Internet traffic, stressing that disruption was minimal and the FBI is working to trace the attackers. Most Internet users didn't notice any effects from Monday's attack because it lasted only one hour and because the Internet's architecture was designed to tolerate such short-term disruptions, experts said. The White House said it was unclear where the attack originated, who might be responsible or whether the attack could be considered cyber-terrorism. "We don't know. We'll take a look to see if there are any signs of who it may or may not be," spokesman Ari Fleischer said. "I'm not aware there's anything that would lead anybody in that direction. History has shown that many of these attacks actually come from the hacker community. But that's why an investigation is under way." The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center and agents from its cyber-crime division were investigating, FBI spokesman Steven Berry said. Civilian technical experts assisting with the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FBI was reviewing electronic logs of computers used in the attack to determine the origin of those responsible. "It's the nature of these things that they're never easy to untangle and yet sometimes there are clues left behind," said Steve Crocker, chairman of an advisory committee on the security and stability of these servers for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Another expert, Paul Mockapetris, the chief scientist at Nominum Inc., said those responsible appeared to use generic "ping flood" attack software that had been installed on computers across the globe using many different Internet providers. His company provides consulting advice to some of the organizations operating the servers. "It was a fairly large attack, but it doesn't look to be an attack designed to do maximum damage," said Richard Probst, a vice president at Nominum. "Either it was a wake-up call or a publicity stunt or a probe to understand how the system works." In so-called "denial of service" attacks, hackers traditionally seize control of third-party computers owned by universities, corporations and even home users and direct them to send floods of data at pre-selected targets. The attack on Monday was notable because it crippled nine of the 13 servers around the globe that manage Internet traffic. Seven failed to respond to legitimate network traffic and two others failed intermittently during the attack, officials confirmed. Service was restored after experts enacted defensive measures and the attack suddenly stopped. "There was some degradation of service; however, nothing failed and providers were able to mitigate the attacks pretty quickly," Fleischer said. A spokesman for Office of Homeland Security, Gordon Johndroe, disputed experts who characterized the attack as the most sophisticated and large-scale assault against these crucial computers in the history of the Internet. He said the attack did not use any special techniques and was not particularly sophisticated. "There were minor degradations, but no failures," Johndroe said. Computer experts who manage some of the affected computers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the attack effectively shut down seven of the 13 computers by saturating their network connections and partially saturating the connections for two others. Although the servers continued operating, they were unable to respond to legitimate Internet requests. The 13 computers are spread geographically across the globe as a precaution against physical disasters and operated by U.S. government agencies, universities, corporations and private organizations. "The public harm in this attack was low," agreed Marc Zwillinger, a former Justice Department lawyer who investigated similar attacks against e-commerce Web sites in 2000. "What it demonstrates is the potential for further harm." Monday's attack wasn't more disruptive because many Internet providers and large corporations and organizations temporarily store, or "cache," popular Web directory information for better performance. Although the Internet theoretically can operate with only a single root server, its performance would slow if more than four root servers failed for any appreciable length of time. Yahoo Users Hit With E-Mail Scam Users of Yahoo's paid services were targeted by scam artists trying to gain access to their personal information, including credit card numbers. In a statement e-mailed to Computerworld Friday, a spokesperson for the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet portal said that an individual or individuals posing as part of Yahoo had sent e-mails to users in an effort to trick them into disclosing their online account information. The spokesperson said Yahoo "takes all reports of fraud by third parties very seriously" and has alerted its users to the scam. Although the spokesperson couldn't provide further details, according to published reports, less than 24 hours elapsed between the time the bogus e-mail was sent and the time Yahoo sent out its own mass e-mail to its users Thursday morning advising them not to respond to the phony request. It wasn't immediately clear what the fraudulent e-mail to customers said. A Yahoo spokesperson said Thursday that some users fell for the request and divulged their credit card numbers, although most did not. Yahoo also said it didn't know the origin of the fraudulent e-mail. Last month, online payment service PayPal was also targeted by scam artists trying to get the personal information of its users. However, unlike Yahoo, PayPal didn't notify its customers of the scam. Top Marketing Lobby Seeks Spam Law The deluge of unsolicited e-mail, or spam, has become such a scourge that even the world's leading consumer marketing lobby says the time has come for federal restrictions. The Direct Marketing Association, which once opposed any federal anti-spam legislation, says it will now lobby for federal and state laws that aim to control the growth of million-message batches of e-mails flogging everything from raunchy sex videos to carpet cleaning. But one top bulk e-mailer says the guidelines proposed by the DMA on Monday would help stabilize his business. And an anti-spam group believes the DMA proposal could actually increase unwanted e-mail. A daily flood of spam not only vexes consumers and Internet providers, whose attempts to block it are circumvented by stealthy e-mailing technology, it also makes legitimate commercial e-mail indistinguishable from unwanted spam, says the DMA, which has 4,700 members. "We need legislation," said Jerry Cerasale, the DMA's vice president for government affairs. "We believe the sheer volume will just swamp the medium and the medium will no longer be useful for marketing." The guidelines proposed by the DMA, which is holding its annual convention in San Francisco this week, aim to prohibit marketers from sending unsolicited e-mails that use deceptive identifiers, such as false subject lines and return addresses. Cerasale said marketers should be required to list the physical address and contact information of the business on whose behalf the message is sent. And, he said, a prominent "unsubscribe" option should be available for recipients who wish to halt further mailings. "If you can't unsubscribe, there's no way to stop it," Cerasale said. "We need to give the consumer the means to try and stop it." Cerasale said the DMA supports unsolicited e-mail marketing as long as it targets a certain demographic or interest group - say, 25-to-35 year-olds or homeowners - and isn't merely sent to every e-mail address one can gather. Such guidelines "might clear out some of the scam artists, but would probably increase the amount of unsolicited e-mails sent by 'legitimate' companies," said John Mozena, co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail. Mozena, based in Detroit, said his group pushes for an "opt-in" solution that permits e-mail marketing only at the recipient's request - or from companies with which the recipient is a customer. The European Union enacted such a law, which takes effect Oct. 31, 2003. About half the U.S. states have anti-spam laws, none as strident as the European measure. For his part, Tom Cowles, who heads Empire Towers Corp., one of the world's largest bulk e-mail firms, said he agrees "wholeheartedly" with the DMA proposal because he believes it will give his business more legitimacy. Cowles and other spammers say they've been forced to cloak their messages with fake headers and use other deceptive identifiers because anti-spam activists harangue the Internet service providers who host their businesses. When the service provider discovers the spam business, the spammer's Web site is often taken down - and with it disappears the software to remove the recipient from future unsolicited mailings. Cowles said guidelines should restrict e-mail content while forcing Internet providers to host marketers that follow the rules. E-mail marketing "should be similar to any other kind of marketing," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio. "Deceptive advertising should be penalized. If someone wants to be removed from your list, they should be removed." Searching for New Ways to Can Spam Shifting from daily nuisance to serious IT and business concern, uncontrolled spam is prompting customers to arm themselves with tools to fight back against productivity loss, potential liability, and bandwidth-clogging consequences that unsolicited commercial e-mail can bring to an enterprise. Targeting a growing concern on the anti-spam battlefront, IronPort Systems on Wednesday introduced technology designed to prevent legitimate e-mail messages from being weeded out by anti-spam filters. IronPort rolled out two e-mail delivery appliances based on the company's Virtual Gateway technology, which allows users to assign a specific outbound IP address to each message based on campaign or message type. The technology, in essence, creates a separate virtual machine for each mailing, separating critical transaction confirmation messages from other marketing messages that might be snared by a spam filter, according to Scott Banister, chairman and chief technology officer of IronPort, based in San Bruno, California. "Companies are finding that if they send out e-mail marketing newsletters, increasingly ISPs are deploying anti-spam systems that often inadvertently trap messages that are legitimate," Banister says. "No one wants to be throwing out babies with the bath water." IronPort's Virtual Gateway assures that even if a marketing message is trapped by a filter, other traffic being sent from the same infrastructure will be unaffected, he says. The two new delivery appliances, the A60 and A30, are designed for high and low volume requirements, respectively. Similarly, last week vendors Postini and BrightMail introduced new anti-spam products and services designed to help end-users restore normalcy to workplace operations being hampered by hundreds upon thousands of e-mail messages targeting random inboxes and servers over the Internet. In fact, most corporate customers and service providers are oblivious to the massive amount of spam proliferation caused by automated e-mail address "harvesting" over the Web, says Joyce Graff, vice president and research director of Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner. "[Spam] is burning your resources, it's keeping your message transfer agent busy doing stupid things, it's clogging bandwidth, clogging disk space, and most important stealing people's time," says Graff. "Even more important, it's creating a very upset work environment." Graff says that tools capable of launching a myriad of spam-related attacks are becoming readily available over the Internet. This enables even beginners to send out spam, and fuels con artists to perpetrate hoaxes, identity theft, fraud, bulk junk mail, and mass market advertising. Spammers easily can set up and dispose of multiple free e-mail accounts to hide their tracks. According to the Gartner analyst, many spam attacks bombarding enterprises feature increasingly vulgar and insensitive content. This raises the question of whether a company is legally responsible for blocking inappropriate spam messages viewed by its employees. Postini customer Lee Rocklage, IT manager of Redwood City, California-based DPR Construction, estimated about 40 percent of his company's daily e-mails at one time were spam. Before deploying Postini's Security Manager product, he notes that offensive e-mail proved a major distraction and was "the biggest complaint" from his employees. "It became a concern," says Rocklage. "We're a service-oriented company and having to sort through all of the unnecessary e-mails each morning to identify those that were important or required a quick response can be very time-consuming." Last week, Postini announced the availability of Postini Perimeter Manager, Postini Security Manager, and Postini Resource Manager, serving as three new service offerings to heighten e-mail protection against spam, viruses, and Directory Harvest Attacks. BrightMail, which offers a software license as well as a services model, made noise on the spam battlefield last week with the launch of BrightMail Anti-Spam 4.0 Enterprise Edition. Designed to support Microsoft Windows 2000 and Sun Solaris environments, the new version can remove randomness inserted by spammers in the header of an e-mail message body to reduce polymorphic spam attacks and can generate rules against slightly altered attacks, says Ren Chin, director of product development at San Francisco-based BrightMail. Albert Rodriguez, president of Ann Arbor, Michigan-based ImageMaster Financial Publishing, says the "annoyance" of unwanted e-mails forced him to seek out a product such as SurfControl's Anti-Spam Agent, which could not only filter spam, but also provide his staff the ability to flag or isolate e-mails for further inspection. "The product is blocking spam but it's doing it by allowing us to have control of exactly what comes through and what doesn't. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't have gotten it," says Rodriguez, who says a queue has been set up to flag key phrases, Web addresses, and re-direction attempts. Graff, the Gartner analyst, says it is critical that customers stay away from generating false positives that could prevent legitimate business or e-mail messages from getting through even if it appears "off-color." Toward that concept, IronPort offers a Bonded Sender program, designed to integrate with the appliances, which lets companies use a financial bond to stand behind valid e-mail messages. Described as a kind of first-class postage stamp for e-mail, the Bonded Sender service signifies to ISPs and corporations that the message sender has a legitimate business relationship with the recipients, Banister says. Oregon Man Fined For Spam E-Mails An Oregon man was ordered Friday to pay nearly $100,000 in the first case brought under Washington's tough law against "spam" e-mails. Attorney General Christine Gregoire's office estimates that Jason Heckel, 28, of Salem, sent as many as 20,000 unsolicited e-mails to Washington residents in 1998, trying to sell a $39.95 booklet called "How to Profit from the Internet." The case was the first brought after the Legislature banned commercial e-mail with misleading information in the subject line, invalid reply addresses or disguised paths of transmission. Judge Douglass North ordered Heckel to pay a $2,000 fine and more than $94,000 in legal fees. Heckel didn't appear in court. In a written statement he said he never intended to break the law, and that he made only about $680 from book sales. Heckel's lawyer Dale Crandall said he plans to appeal, and argued that state anti-spam laws violate the U.S. Constitution's protection of interstate commerce. "It would create a patchwork of laws that would be impossible to keep up with," Crandall said. Gary Gardner, executive director of the Washington Association of Internet Service Providers, one of the anti-spam law's backers, said he hoped the fine is the beginning of a new push to enforce the law. "Our goal was never to make any money on this stuff," Gardner said. "It's to put these people out of business." AOL Launches Kids' Safety Campaign America Online is launching a new Internet-safety campaign for kids built around an automated instant-messaging "buddy" that dispenses advice in real time. Kids can add "AOLSafetyBot" to their buddy lists of friends on AOL Instant Messenger. It's programmed to answer, within seconds, such questions as whether kids should agree to physical meetings with online acquaintances or reveal such personal information as their address and age. Some experts wonder, however, whether a scripted program can always be an appropriate guide in a complicated online world, given varying age groups and parental preferences. The SafetyBot campaign, being launched Wednesday, also includes a Web site at AOL's SafetyClicks.com, where kids can play a trivia game and watch a video featuring characters from the Cartoon Network (news - web sites), a unit of AOL Time Warner. People who don't use AOL's instant-messaging software can also find the SafetyBot buddy on the SafetyClicks site. Automated instant-messaging buddies, or bots, are not new, but past ones have been mostly devoted to marketing and promotions. Internet safety resources also exist elsewhere as Web sites, among them Disney's SurfSwellIsland.com. AOL said it created SafetyBot to bring safety resources to a forum with which kids are already familiar. The company's instant-messaging software is the most popular on the Internet, with more than 150 million registered users. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 40 percent of teenagers on the Internet use instant messaging (news - web sites) on a given day, compared with 11 percent for online adults. "Instant messaging clearly is a form of communications that they enjoy so there was a natural predisposition to using a bot," said Tatiana Gau, AOL's senior vice president for integrity assurance. According to a 2000 study by Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, one in five youths aged 10 to 17 received unwanted sexual solicitations over the Internet within the year. Only a quarter of them told a parent. Will kids use the bot instead of asking parents for advice? Will parents depend on the bot to supervise their kids? Gau said the bot is not meant for that or as a substitute for other safety resources. "Obviously as a bot, it has intelligence and the ability to answer and handle certain questions," she said. But "they have certain limitations as all bots do." Many of the answers emphasize telling parents if, say, an online acquaintance asks for a meeting or personal information. Parry Aftab, a leading Internet-safety expert, applauded efforts to make learning about safety fun. "The kids will play with it, and if they play with it, maybe they will learn something," she said. But she cautioned that correct answers may depend on age and other factors - for instance, some parents may want to handle meeting strangers differently. The AOL bot offers only generic responses. And even safety experts may disagree on the proper approach. Aftab said she used to recommend that kids give strangers a false name - until someone pointed out that kids might then consider lying permissible behavior. "There is not always one clear answer," she said. The AOL bot, made available to The Associated Press for testing, was good about giving relevant answers on general safety issues, such as sending photos to strangers, protecting passwords and confronting bad language. But it did not always answer questions head-on. For example, the question "Could you meet me at Kmart?" returned a warning never to meet online friends in person without a parent. The question "Could you come to Kmart with me?" returned a generic message introducing the bot. Off-topic questions occasionally yielded humorous answers. What are your hobbies? "I like to dance. (The "electric slide" is my favorite.) I also like to read and surf the Internet." Why are you annoying? "Well, I am a bot." Other times, even on questions related to Internet safety, the bot said it couldn't understand and directed the user to ask again, visit a menu of safety tips or ask a parent. AOL officials say the bot, which only responds when addressed, was programmed to make such replies rather than guess and potentially give a wrong answer. More questions and answers will be added over time. On the Net: AOL safety site: http://www.safetyclicks.com Aftab site: http://www.wiredkids.org Disney safety site: http://www.surfswellisland.com Webcasters Get Royalties Extension Smaller Internet music broadcasters are getting an extension on copyright royalty payments that would have been due Sunday, which means they can avoid shutting down. The webcasters will still have to pay up to $2,500 each in fees by Monday. But that is far less than the tens of thousands of dollars that many of them would have owed. The extension, granted by the recording industry and performance artists Friday, came a day after the Senate recessed for the elections without approving copyright rate revisions negotiated between webcasters and the copyright holders. The changes, unanimously approved by the House earlier this month, would have significantly reduced payment obligations for smaller webcasters, who complained that the higher rates could have put them out of business. "From the beginning, we have wanted to work with webcasters, and this temporary payment policy is another example of our commitment to the webcasting industry," said John L. Simson, executive director of SoundExchange, the organization collecting payments on behalf of the music industry and the artists. Only webcasters that would have qualified for reduced payments under the webcasting bill will be eligible for the extension. Simson's statement, issued late Friday, said the extension will be in effect until Congress could act on the bill. The statement does not say what would happen if Congress never passes the bill, or if the president does not sign it, although the statement refers to "this Congress" - which adjourns at year's end. A message left with Simson after business hours was not immediately returned. Traditional radio broadcasters have been exempt from paying royalties to recording labels and performance artists on the grounds that the broadcasts had promotional value. In 1998, Congress passed a copyright law requiring such royalties from webcasters. An arbitration panel proposed rates of $1.40 per song heard by 1,000 listeners, and the U.S. Copyright Office halved them in June and set the Sunday deadline for payments. Under the settlement awaiting legislative approval, smaller webcasters could calculate payments based on how much they earn or spend. For a small webcaster like Ultimate-80s, that meant owing $7,700 instead of $24,000. Even the reduced rates are too high for some. Internet Radio Hawaii briefly went offline, although it has come back after listeners donated more than $2,000. Hundreds of other stations had previously shut down. MSN Says to Lock Fees, Halt 'Pop-Up' Ads MSN, Microsoft Corp.'s Internet service, said on Thursday it will lock in its monthly dial-up access fee at $21.95 for 12 months, compared with archrival America Online's monthly rate of $23.90. In another effort to one-up its AOL Time Warner Inc.-owned rival, MSN also said its latest version, MSN 8, would no longer display pop-up advertising, which appears in separate windows as users surf the Web. Earlier this month, America Online said it would sell no more pop-ups to outside companies, but said it would continue to display pop-ups promoting its own properties. MSN, in contrast, is halting both outside and in-house pop-ups. Microsoft Starts Testing New Version of Office Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it started preliminary testing of the next version of its Office productivity software, as the world's largest software maker prepares its products for Web-enabled services. The next version of Office, code-named "Office 11" and due out in mid-2003 after user testing, will include many of the building blocks of Microsoft's broad .NET initiative that aims to provide software and services that will work across platforms and devices, Microsoft said. Office 11 will broadly support XML, or extensible markup language, which allows data to be shared and exchanged between different types of programs, Microsoft said, making it more suitable for business users. "It's about being connected and connecting business processes," said David Jaffe, lead product manager for Office. Office, which includes the Word application for documents, Excel for spreadsheet analysis and Powerpoint for presentations, will also be more closely integrated with a feature called SharePoint, which allows groups of people to work on the same document and collaborate without having to exchange files and e-mail repeatedly, said Jaffe. Office, which nearly equals and sometimes exceeds Windows as Microsoft's largest franchise, is beginning to see a slowdown. In Microsoft's latest business year, ended June 30, the "Information Worker" segment, which includes Office, dipped 2.5 percent. Airborne Computer Mouse Unveiled Much of personal computing is about "can you top this?" development, so a mention a few weeks ago about a rechargeable wireless optical mouse brought in another rechargeable, wireless mouse. The difference is, this one's airborne. Meaning, like all optical mice, it doesn't need a desktop mouse pad. But it also doesn't need a desk. The $79.95 Ultra Cordless Optical Mouse from Gyration, Inc., of Saratoga, Calif., uses gyroscopic sensors to control the cursor movement as you move your wrist, arm, whatever through the air. And, says the specs, it will do it from 25 feet away. Could be - the review unit was only tested from 10 feet, because farther than that, I couldn't see the cursor anyway. When it's sitting on a surface, the Ultra Cordless functions like most other opticals, with left-click, scroll and right-click buttons. But when you lift it, the usual red optical glow disappears and the gyroscopes take over when you depress a big button on the underside. The best technique is to move the cursor to where you want to go and then release the underside trigger button. The cursor freezes on screen, and you can then click or whatever. Using it makes you seem like you're trying to catch fruit flies in one-handed slow motion, and will probably draw a few curious stares from family or colleagues. And then they'll want to try it out. Installation involved popping the receiver into a USB port and giving the mouse a nine-hour charge in the supplied charging pod. Beyond the obvious application for those who willfully lay Powerpoint presentations on their fellow human beings, those whose wrists hurt when they mouse ought to give this a look. With a little experimentation, I found I could easily control the cursor by moving my whole arm, or, with the mouse held in both hands, my whole torso. And, with the mouse held at belt level, it could even be controlled by walking back and forth. Or doing a hula. (Of course the office door was closed - the flock of 20-somethings outside have enough to snicker about as it is.) Aerobic mousing aside, those who surf the net will find it easier to do without being tied to a horizontal surface. The Ultra Cordless Optical Mouse doesn't care whether the machine is a PC or a Mac. And it reports data at 80 hertz, faster than the typical wireless, so cursor movement is smooth. Gyration says the mouse is moving into retail and is available online at GyrationDirect.com. New York Fines Microsoft for Ads Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates is boasting that the software giant will spend $300 million to promote the latest version of its Internet service. He may have underestimated by just a bit. After plastering city sidewalks, streets and other public property with butterfly-shaped advertising decals, New York City has sent Microsoft a $50 summons. Microsoft vice president Yusuf Mehdi said the company was sorry. "We made a mistake with the decals, and we take full responsibility for what happened," Mehdi said in a statement issued by Microsoft's public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. "We're working with city officials to clean up the decals immediately." City officials in New York, Chicago and San Francisco have fought back against similar illegal "guerrilla" ad campaigns by IBM, Snapple and Nike. In April, IBM paid San Francisco $120,000 in fines and cleanup costs for an ad campaign in which sidewalks were spray-painted with ads. Chicago also fined the computer maker for similar corporate graffiti. In New York, municipal workers removed hundreds of Microsoft decals on Thursday and planned to remove hundreds more on Friday, said Transportation Department spokesman Tom Cocola. "We intend to hold your firm directly responsible for this illegal, irresponsible and dangerous defacing of public property," Cesar Fernandez, the department's assistant counsel, said in a letter to Microsoft. Fernandez said Microsoft could be sued if it sticks more ads on city property. A public relations spokeswoman for Microsoft, Kathy Gill of the Waggener Edstrom agency, said Thursday that the software company received a city permit to place the blue, green, orange and yellow butterflies on streets and sidewalks. Gill didn't say which city agency issued the permit, and Cocola said the DOT has not seen it. On Friday, another Microsoft spokeswoman cast doubt on whether the company had permission to post the ads, saying Microsoft was "looking into it." The decals were part of a splashy promotional campaign for the company's release of an upgraded MSN Internet service stocked with Disney's content. Many of the decals were clustered on sidewalks near Central Park, where Gates and Walt Disney Co. chairman Michael Eisner announced the deal Thursday. "It's a real coup," Gates said during the kickoff spectacle, flanked by Eisner and a pair of extras in Mickey and Minnie Mouse suits. Pop star Lenny Kravitz played an invitation-only concert at the event. Neither mentioned the sidewalk decals, which seemed to mimic the New York promotions by Nike and Snapple. Sites Missing From Google What you get through Google's powerful and popular search engines may depend on where you live. A report Thursday from Harvard Law School found at least 100 sites missing from search results when accessing Google sites meant for French and German users. Most of the missing sites are ones that deny the Holocaust or promote white supremacy. France and Germany have strict laws banning hate speech, while the United States favors freedom of expression even for unpopular viewpoints. The sites themselves were not blocked. But the effect is the same when users cannot find them, said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. "Search engines are an incredible tool for people to locate information on the Web," Sullivan said. "If you pull a Web site out of a search engine, you are in some degree censoring, in some degree making it inaccessible to some people." In a statement, Google spokesman Nathan Tyler said the company must occasionally remove sites to avoid legal liability. Such removals, he said, are in response to specific requests and are not done preemptively. "We carefully consider any credible complaint on a case-by-case basis and take necessary action," Tyler said. "We only react to requests that come to us." Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and several other companies run separate sites for different countries, often in native languages and featuring local currencies. The primary, ".com" version is generally considered the U.S. site, though it is accessible from elsewhere, including France and Germany. Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Ben Edelman, a Berkman researcher, found about 65 sites excluded from Google.de, the German site. They found 113 sites, including the 65, missing at Google.fr, the French site. Testing was conducted Oct. 4-21. Edelman said users would have no inkling of any exclusions unless they compared search results side by side. He suggested Google could better serve users by inserting a "placeholder" where sites are removed due to government or other censorship. Google's stated policy calls for removing links when site owners request them. It also removes them for legal reasons, most prominently when the Church of Scientology International complained of copyright violations at a Norwegian site run by critics. After free-speech advocates complained, Google agreed to notify the site ChillingEffects.org when it gets a copyright-related removal request. Google, as a private company, is generally not bound by the free-speech guarantees in the First Amendment, which applies to restrictions imposed by government. But Edelman said that private or not, the company has a public responsibility as a widely used resource. =~=~=~= Atari Online News, Etc. is a weekly publication covering the entire Atari community. Reprint permission is granted, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of any article, to Atari user groups and not for profit publications only under the following terms: articles must remain unedited and include the issue number and author at the top of each article reprinted. Other reprints granted upon approval of request. Send requests to: dpj@atarinews.org No issue of Atari Online News, Etc. may be included on any commercial media, nor uploaded or transmitted to any commercial online service or internet site, in whole or in part, by any agent or means, without the expressed consent or permission from the Publisher or Editor of Atari Online News, Etc. Opinions presented herein are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the staff, or of the publishers. 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