Spyware Explained: "Spyware and malware are at plague proportions, and your network might be full of spyware-infected machines that use up bandwidth, slow everything down, and cost you time and money. Jonathan Read shows you where spyware originates, how you can educate network users, and how to stop spyware. This is a must-read for all system administrators and anyone who uses the Internet."

NewsFactor Network - - Lindows Wins Over Microsoft in Dutch Court: "A court in the Netherlands has ruled that the Linux distributor may use the name 'Lindows' for general corporate purposes, even though the company earlier was ordered to cease using it in the Benelux region for its operating system and Web site. "

ITBusiness.ca: "The province of Ontario Thursday said it has reached an agreement with Sun Microsystems of Canada to provide more than two million students with access to the company's StarOffice desktop productivity suite.
Financial details of the arrangement were not disclosed, but Sun Canada's director for education and research Lynne Zucker said that the fee was minimal.
A potential benefit of using StarOffice is that it is available on Windows, Solaris and Linux, said Zucker. The latter may be of particular interest to schools, she said, given the growth of open source software in public sector markets. She said that some of the biggest StarOffice deals Sun has reached are with governments in China and South America.

"

BBC NEWS | Middle East | What now for Iraq's Mehdi Army?: "Radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr has offered to withdraw his militia from the holy Iraqi city of Najaf.
The fighters, called the Mehdi Army after a messianic figure in the Shia tradition, have been fighting coalition forces since early April.
But despite their name, they are not actually an army.

"In Iraq many people have guns, every family has a gun, and these people are simply armed Shias from urban areas...there is nothing to disband. What they are likely to do is just melt away, they will go back to their homes and their jobs and just keep their guns with them."

International News Article | Reuters.com: " British journalist Peter Hounam will be released from Israeli custody later on Thursday, said a lawyer for the reporter who broke Mordechai Vanunu's account of Israel's nuclear secrets in 1986.
...
"The man was arrested without reason, out of a ceaseless security obsession with Vanunu," his attorney said.
...
Hounam's 1986 interview with Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona reactor, led independent analysts to conclude Israel had stockpiled hundreds of nuclear weapons, making it one of the world's top atomic powers. "

Eclipse Special: Remote Debugging Tomcat & JBoss Apps with Eclipse (SYS-CON)Over the last several weeks I've received a few questions about remote debugging with Eclipse. I posted about this on my other article back in February but with not enough info for others to follow.

Herald.com: Miami & Ft. Lauderdale News, Weather, Dolphins & More: "The release of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield after the FBI acknowledged it had mistakenly matched his fingerprint to one found near the scene of the deadly Madrid train bombings is the latest illustration of what critics say is a flawed U.S. antiterrorism policy that threatens Americans' civil liberties and privacy."

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Court-Martial: Soldier Who Refused to Return Is Found Guilty of Desertion: "A military jury convicted a member of the Florida National Guard on Friday at a court-martial in Fort Stewart, Ga., on charges of desertion because he refused to return to his unit in Iraq, saying he objected to the war there.
Sergeant Mejia, 28, has said his experience in Iraq, seeing brutality, senseless deaths and commanders who he said put glory over good decisions, convinced him that the war was "oil driven" and immoral."

washingtonpost.com: U.S. Faces Growing Fears of Failure: "The Bush administration is struggling to counter growing sentiment -- among U.S. lawmakers, Iraqis and even some of its own officials -- that the occupation of Iraq is verging on failure, forcing a top Pentagon official yesterday to concede serious mistakes over the past year.

Under tough questioning from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a leading administration advocate of the Iraq intervention, acknowledged miscalculating that Iraqis would tolerate a long occupation. A central flaw in planning, he added, was the premise that U.S. forces would be creating a peace, not fighting a war, after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
...
The U.S.-led coalition has dramatically lowered its goals, they say, from an early pledge to create a stable, democratic country that would be a model for transforming the greater Middle East, to scrambling to cobble together an interim government by June 30 that will have only limited political authority and still depend on more than 130,000 foreign troops.
"

Onlineblog.com - Guardian Online's weblog
And a test image:
.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'There were rockets, shells. It was war. Then bulldozers destroyed everything'Um Hisham Qishta stood at the spot where she cradled a dying Israeli soldier in her arms a few days ago and said she was going nowhere. But just in case the armoured bulldozers came too close, she bundled the entire contents of her immaculate flat into plastic sacks yesterday and sent the furniture off on the back of a donkey cart. On the street below almost every family left in the Saladin district of Rafah was hauling belongings on to wooden carts in advance of the coming storm.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The Bushes and the Bin Ladens: passionate anti-war film is a tale of two familiesIt was strident, passionate, sometimes outrageously manipulative and often bafflingly selective in its material, but Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was a barnstorming anti-war/anti-Bush polemic tossed like an incendiary device into the crowded Cannes festival.
It included a full-scale denunciation of the links between the Bush and Bin Laden families, the petro-commercial association which allowed dozens of the Bin Laden family to leave the country for Saudi Arabia after 9/11 and which necessitated the Iraq war as a massive diversion.

NewsFactor Network - - Yahoo Hangs Tough in Google Face-Off: "Though usually trailing Google in the search-engine features wars, Yahoo appears to be picking and choosing its battles. It is leading Google with its instant-message offering, for example. That is one free service that Google does not offer -- at least not yet. "

Hi-flying Wi-Fi debuts on transatlantic flight
: "Passengers flying on a Lufthansa flight from Munich to Los Angeles on Monday became the first to experience in-flight Wi-Fi - a broadband wireless internet connection.
The satellite-based system enables passengers to surf the web and send emails from their own Wi-Fi-enabled laptop or handheld computers instead of using the more limited services some airlines offer through their seatback displays.
The system, called FlyNet, has already been installed on five of Lufthansa's fleet, with plans to extend this to all 80 of the German airline's long-haul planes by the end of 2006.
Passengers will share a download capability of five megabits per second, while uploading traffic, such as sending emails, will run at one Mbps. This speed of connection is comparable with that used in a small office.
The cost to passengers is $10 for half an hour, or a flat rate of $30 for the entire flight. This is far cheaper that the $16 per email charged by some companies via seatback equipment."

PCWorld.com - Google's Gmail Already Under Fire: "The gigabyte storage capacity and long memory of Google's planned Web-based e-mail service are making it a big target for privacy campaigners--and the name, Gmail, could soon be the subject of a trademark dispute, too.

A coalition of 28 privacy and civil liberties groups wrote Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page a letter this week urging them to think again about the service, which they say sets potentially dangerous precedents for the automated scanning of private communications. The service may conflict with European privacy laws, and should be suspended until privacy issues are addressed, they wrote."

PCWorld.com - Yahoo Boosts E-Mail Storage: "Not to be outdone by Google's recent bold e-mail offering, Yahoo says that it plans to dramatically raise the storage limit given to its free e-mail users while at the same time bumping its premium subscribers up to a "virtually unlimited" capacity.

The storage hikes were announced by Yahoo executives at an analyst meeting this week, where the company was keen to show that it is ready to take on rival Google.

Google grabbed headlines with the announcement in March that it is planning to offer a free e-mail service with a 1GB limit dubbed Gmail."

Google's Gmail: Inventive, Influential...and Not Too InvasiveGoogle may have stumbled into an unexpected privacy fracas when it announced that its Gmail service would display text ads based on keywords in your incoming e-mail's text. But after having used the beta version of the service for a few weeks, I'm impressed by what a well-designed service it is. And it's clear that it's raising the bar for Web-based e-mail in a way that will benefit users of other services, too.

First, the privacy issue: The best way to gauge if you're going to feel like Gmail is violating yours is to try the service for awhile. Which is what I've been doing, and so far, the ads (which are standard Google text links, to the right of an e-mail's text) seem pretty innocuous. Conceptually, the notion of ads keyed to e-mail text weirded me out; in practice, it's proving to be mundane...even easy to ignore. (Of course, most of my e-mail is pretty mundane itself--I don't know how I'd feel if I was discussing things that I didn't want even an automated software bot to pick up on.)

Implausible Denial IIn Saturday, May 15--twenty-four hours after The Nation published "Implausible Denial"--The New Yorker posted on its website Seymour Hersh's latest Abu Ghraib-related investigative report. Its central revelation: The interrogations at Abu Ghraib were part of a highly classified Special Access Program (SAP) code-named Copper Green, authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately overseen by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. Originally a joint CIA-Pentagon program in Afghanistan that utilized highly trained Special Operations personnel, Copper Green eventually expanded to Iraq, Hersh reports, where Cambone decided it would begin using non-Special Operations personnel--including military intelligence officers and other military personnel--to begin questioning prisoners whose status was outside the program's original brief. The CIA objected and withdrew from the program, while Cambone apparently tasked Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Guantánamo Bay interrogations chief, with "Gitmo-izing" Iraq's prison system.

washingtonpost.com: Community Razed Along With Its Homes in GazaAzizah Abu Anzah was watching an Arab soap opera on television when a 56-ton armored bulldozer ate its way to her house in this Palestinian refugee camp on the Gaza Strip's southern edge.

The 30-year-old woman recalls grabbing her children and hiding behind a house in the next alley. She stole peeks around the corner as a blade taller than a man began scraping away her three-room home.

"All the neighbors came and ran inside to collect my furniture -- the bed, TV, my new washing machine, some blankets -- and the bulldozer didn't stop," Abu Anzah said. "We were all crying. It was a day I will never forget."

ONLamp.com: Why Learning Assembly Language Is Still a Good Idea II: "The world is full of case studies outlining software engineering disasters. Almost every programmer has had to work on a project involving 'less than stellar' source code that was difficult to read and maintain. On rare occasion, some programmers get the opportunity to work on a well-designed system, an awe-inspiring piece of craftsmanship that usually produces the exclamation, 'This is truly great code!'
Clearly, professional software engineers should strive to achieve this level of greatness in all their code. But the real question is, 'What makes code great?' Simply 'meeting specifications' is not how one writes great code. True, in today's software environment, some might actually believe that simply meeting the specifications sets an application apart, as many development projects fail to meet their basic design goals.
However, in other areas greatness is rarely defined by doing the expected and succeeding; greatness is defined by going above and beyond what is expected. Software engineers should expect no less from great software--it should go above and beyond the standard conventions for software development. "

Middle East: EU Announces Aid Package For Palestinians, Laments Escalation Of ViolenceThe European Commission today announced a 28 million euro ($33 million) humanitarian-aid package for the Palestinian territories.
The grant takes the EU's assistance to the Palestinians since September 2000 to 147 million euros, making it the largest provider of humanitarian, as well as development aid.

NWC Project: Spam Filters Exposed | Taking The Bite out of Spam | May 9, 2004 | Network ComputingWe're pleased to bring you our newest installment of NWC Project, Spam Filters Exposed. Over the next two weeks we'll bring you a number of special reports and tools to compliment our deep review of antispam solutions and introduction to the problem of spam.

US will fail - ICSSA"The Western people in particular are the victims of a gigantic and deadly hoax. They are told that the war on Afghanistan and Iraq is no more a war for WMD or democracy, or terrorism any more. These were just initial steps towards “a war between radical Islam and America.
...
Democracy is now used as a weapon to achieve the objective of weakening the exaggerated threat of Islam. The reason is that there are some principles of democracy that are compatible with Islam and some are in total contradiction to its core principles. To make Islam compatible to these principle, rather than doing the other way round, is an invitation to continuous trouble and an exercise in futility.”

Is programming dead? - News - ZDNet...All of these things together do not make reusable applications but they help. There is another knock-on effect: now the standards are virtually complete and universally accepted, the standards bodies themselves (such as the Object Management Group) have had to set their sights on new things to standardize. What they have come up with is rather intriguing. Essentially, having agreed the tools and techniques to be used, they have turned their attention to the process, defining what they call model driven architecture, or MDA.

The goal of MDA is quite straightforward: to enable applications to be specified entirely in modeling terms, which are platform independent, rather than in code, which varies depending on the target architecture. From the OMG’s perspective this is largely a boon for application integrators, who spend (nay, waste) time converting perfectly good code to work on different systems. As it is defined, MDA enables such lower level programming to be automated by code generators, freeing up time to be spent on the more interesting stuff – the business logic.....

German teen confesses to creating Sasser worm | CP: "HANOVER, Germany (AP) - A German high-school student has confessed to creating the Sasser worm that generated chaos around the globe by infecting hundreds of thousands of computers, authorities said Saturday.

Microsoft said informants contacted it Wednesday, offering information about the worm's creator. The company's investigators worked with German authorities, the FBI and U.S. Secret Service agents, tracing the virus by analyzing its source code, said Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer."

Linux News: Open Source: Novell Debuts Mono Beta To Challenge .NET: "Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) this week released the first public beta version of its Mono 1.0 software -- the company's planned alternative to Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) .NET platform.

Mono lets Linux users run Microsoft ASP.NET and Web services applications without having to recompile their software. The first beta release also runs on Windows, Mac OS and Novell NetWare. "

.NET Goes Open Source and Catches Mono: "Microsoft's .NET Framework has won many converts since it was first released with even the open source community now appearing to embrace it. There are currently at least two open source projects that are developing implementations of the .NET Framework, the Novell Ximian-led Mono and the DotGNU project.
The Mono Project was begun by Ximian co-founder de Icaza in 2001 and was originally expected to have been released by the end of 2003. Essentially Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET 1.1 specifications that are now under the standardization control of the EMCA standards body.
Mono includes tools that allow for a degree of language and platform independence for the creation of production API's and SDK. For example, a developer may use C#, Python or PHP as their language of choice and deploy on GNU/Linux or Window without issue.
"

IBLNEWS : U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the SciencesThe United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals.

Islam Online- Muslims Inaugurate New Mosque In Spain : "BARCELONA, May 9 (IslamOnline.net) - A new mosque has been inaugurated in the northeastern Spanish city of Reus amid reports of a government drive to place all Muslim worshipping places under close scrutiny.
The new mosque was built in the city�s industrial zone on a 230-square-meter area to the relief of the small local Muslim community, who have been calling for this for more than three years, reported the Spanish El Periodico on Sunday, May 8. "

Islam Online- Qur'an…New Translation In Contemporary English: "Responding to the increasing need of native speakers to fully understand the meanings of the Glorious Qur'an, a new English translation by a British-Egyptian professor will be launched on Thursday, May 13 and published by Oxford University.
'I was inspired by feelings expressed by my BA, MA and PhD students who are native speakers of English, that the existing translations were written in a language that was outdated, difficult to follow, foreign-sounding and unattractive to the reader,' Muhammad Abdel Haleem told IslamOnline.net over the phone from London.
And in some cases, such translations do not give an accurate rendering of the meaning of the Arabic, added Abdel Haleem, a Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University."

Islam Online- News Section: "The onetime fighter earned himself innumerable enemies when he switched to Moscow's side during the current war.
He appealed to the Kremlin when it was looking for someone to head Chechnya in June 2000, after its troops swept away Maskhadov.
On April 10, international and Russian rights groups said in a joint report that the United Nations and the international community should denounce "gross and systematic violations" of human rights in Chechnya at the hands of Russian troops and pro-Moscow Chechen militias led by Kadyrov’s son."

Islam Online- Russia To Exploit Kadyrov’s Killing - Chechen FighterMOSCOW, May 9 (IslamOnline.net) - Russia will exploit the killing of Chechnya 's pro-Moscow President Ahmad Kadyrov and will surely launch attacks on Chechen fighters outposts as well as against civilians in Chechnya, said a former Chechen fighter on Sunday, May 9.

The official known as Abu Bakar Chechen told IslamOnline.net that he could not confirm who "did the job" to eliminate what he called the 'fake Mufti' but that he was "sure and certain the impact will be huge in the war that is still raging in many places in Chechnya".

Bloomberg.com: Chechen President Killed in Explosion, 42 Wounded An explosion in the Russian republic of Chechnya killed President Akhmad Kadyrov, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in televised comments at a meeting with Kadyrov's son, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The blast killed four and wounded 42 others, said an official at the Emergency Situations Ministry who asked not to be named. The blast occurred at about 10:30 a.m. local time in a stadium in Grozny during Victory Day celebrations marking the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, the official said.

Kadyrov, 52, a former Muslim cleric, was elected president of the republic on Oct. 5, 2003. Once a rebel leader who called on Chechens to fight a holy war against the Russians, he changed sides after the first Chechen war. The attack may undermine Putin's attempts to show that the war in Chechnya is over.

Wired News: Sick of Spam? Prepare for AdwareThe biggest threat to personal computing is neither spam nor viruses. Rather, it's the proliferation of a new category of deceptive software that takes over unwitting victims' computers for the purpose of gathering their personal information and bombarding them with unwanted advertising.

Dubbed spyware, adware, sneakware or malware -- depending on who you talk to -- these programs embed themselves deep inside a computer's operating system and spawn windows full of advertising messages, preventing users from accessing any other application. Or, they hide in the background, secretly transmitting information about the user's Web-surfing habits to a server somewhere on the Internet. If the user tries to delete the programs, they act like a cancer and replicate themselves over and over.

Bush Apologizes for Abuse of Prisoners (washingtonpost.com)Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq prison abuse scandal brought him under withering fire yesterday: Prominent Democrats, including presidential candidate John F. Kerry and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, demanded his resignation, while senior Republicans fumed over his failure to alert them to the brewing crisis.

ITBusiness.caCanada has once again left the rest of the Western world in the dust when it comes to e-government, according to the fourth annual Accenture study released Tuesday.

US Anti-Muslim Incidents Up 70 Pct in 2003 -ReportIncidents of violence, discrimination and harassment against Muslims in the United States soared 70 percent in 2003 over the previous year, an Islamic civil rights group reported on Monday.

The war in Iraq and the lingering atmosphere of fear from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks contributed to the sharp rise in anti-Muslim activity, according to a report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Other factors included an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric by some in government and the media, implementation of the USA Patriot Act -- which has been criticized as infringing on the constitutional right to privacy -- and increased reporting and documentation by members of the Muslim community, the report said.

PCWorld.com - Microsoft Makes Waves in PDA MarketMost PDA users were introduced to the device through the Palm OS, but Microsoft's handheld operating system is proving popular. Microsoft's Windows CE .Net family has pulled into a virtual tie with the Palm OS, according to first-quarter market share information from Gartner.

PDA vendors shipped 1.11 million units with the Palm OS in the first quarter, down 21 percent from the first quarter of 2003, says Todd Kort, principal analyst with Gartner. Shipments of Windows devices increased 4.6 percent from last year's first quarter to 1.10 million units.

Forbes.com: Palm Vs. Windows MobilePalm or Windows Mobile? Among a certain type of geek it's a question as fundamental as Coke or Pepsi? or chocolate or vanilla? that says a great deal about a person's personality.

"The market for the standalone PDA has stabilized," Burden, of market research firm IDC, says. "There will always be a market for a PDA that doesn't come with a service contract, but the question is, how does the PDA device evolve in such a way that it stays relevant in the years to come?"

Indeed, overall sales for the handheld computing market declined last year by nearly 18% over 2002 when consumers scooped up 12.6 million PDAs.

Symantec Security Response - W32.Sasser.B.Worm: "W32.Sasser.B.Worm is a variant of W32.Sasser.Worm. It attempts to exploit the LSASS vulnerability described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-011, and spreads by scanning randomly-chosen IP addresses for vulnerable systems"

BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | Muslims seek to worship in ancient mosqueIn southern Spain, once the centre of an Islamic civilisation in Europe, the Muslim community has appealed to the Vatican to be allowed to pray alongside Christians in what was once the Great Mosque of Cordoba.