NewsScan Daily, 27 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 27 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        'Mydoom' Virus Makes the Rounds
        EC Favors Tough Stance in Microsoft Case
        Philips Unveils Foldable Screens for E-Newspapers
        Musicians Bypass Record Labels With New Online Venture
        The Culture of Spam

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: The Sopranos in Academia

'MYDOOM' VIRUS MAKES THE ROUNDS
      A new worm is wending its way through corporate networks, 
masquerading as a normal e-mail message but containing malicious code that 
propagates itself by mass-mailing more messages at the rate of 200 per 
minute. It also props open a "backdoor" that leaves the infected computer 
vulnerable to further misuse. Symantec said the worm -- dubbed "Mydoom," 
"Novarg" or "WORM--MIMAIL.R" -- appears to contain a program that logs 
keystrokes on infected machines, enabling it to collect the username and 
passwords of unsuspecting users. Network Associates, however, disputed that 
assertion, saying it had not found any keylogging program. The Mydoom worm 
spread rapidly yesterday, with about 3,800 infections found within 45 
minutes of its initial discovery. "As far as I can tell right now, it's 
pretty much everywhere on the planet," says Vincent Gullotto, VP of Network 
Associates' virus response team. The subject lines can vary, but may 
include phrases like "Mail Delivery System" or "Mail Transaction Failed." 
The attachments are generally ".exe," ".scr," ".cmd," or ".pif" files and 
may be compressed as a Zip file. (AP/New York Times 27 Jan 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-E-Mail-Worm.html

EC FAVORS TOUGH STANCE IN MICROSOFT CASE
      European Commission antitrust chief Mario Monti is circulating a 
draft of his conclusions in the EC's case against Microsoft, a prelude to a 
final ruling. Although details are scarce, a source familiar with the EC's 
deliberations said the recommendations include an unbundling rule that 
would force Microsoft to separate its Windows Media Player software from 
its operating system. Microsoft likely will also have to disclose more 
technical information so that rival server systems may operate well with 
Windows, and the commission could also fine the software giant as much as 
$3 billion, although a penalty of that magnitude is considered unlikely. 
Microsoft has protested against the unbundling requirement, arguing that 
the media player is so deeply integrated into Windows that removing would 
damage the operating system, but commissioners appear unmoved by the 
company's lobbying efforts. A final EC decision is expected by summer. 
(Washington Post 27 Jan 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50510-2004Jan26.html

PHILIPS UNVEILS FOLDABLE SCREENS FOR E-NEWSPAPERS
      Philips Electronics is gearing up to mass-produce a 5-inch display 
that can be rolled up into a pen-sized holder and stashed in a briefcase or 
pocket. The foldable display features electronic circuits made of plastic, 
using technology developed by E Ink, a private firm based in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts. "We can produce this in batches. It's no longer a research 
project. We're going to build a pilot line that should be ready in 2005 to 
make one million displays a year," says a spokesman for Philips Research. 
Pricing has not been set yet, but Philips said it likely would be in the 
same range as the company's current line of thin glass models, which sell 
in the tens of dollars apiece. (Reuters 26 Jan 2004)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=A3Y4QK15BETOCCRBAEKSFEY?type=technologyNews&storyID=4208939

MUSICIANS BYPASS RECORD LABELS WITH NEW ONLINE VENTURE
      Rock veterans and Internet enthusiasts Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno 
are launching a musician's alliance next month that aims to cut the 
middlemen out of the music sales process by promoting online sales by 
musicians directly to their fans. The alliance, dubbed the "Magnificent 
Union of Digitally Downloading Artists" or MUDDA, would allow musicians to 
set their own prices and agendas, free from the artificial confines of the 
CD format. Gabriel says he's not trying to shut down the record labels, but 
wants to give artists more options, building on the success of legitimate 
download sites such as Apple's iTunes music store. "I'm an artist who works 
incredibly slowly. If some of those [songs] could be made available, you 
don't have to be so trapped into this old way of being confined only by the 
album cycle," says Gabriel. (AP/Los Angeles Times 27 Jan 2004)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-music27jan27,1,5482042.story?coll=la-headlines-technology

THE CULTURE OF SPAM
      Who would ever have thought that spam would someday be chic, the 
subject of an avant-garde show titled "Reimaging the Ordovician Gothic: 
Fossils from the Golden Age of Spam." The display considers how future 
historians would view today's culture if all they had to go on was a vast 
collection of junk e-mail. A classification scheme sorts the spam into such 
categories as Real Estate, Urgent Messages, Work at Home, Goods and 
Personal Appearance, and the artists have scrawled representative excerpts 
from each on the walls of a gallery stairwell and packed suitcases with 
diet pills, house blueprints and some of the other wares frequently hawked 
online. Just as paleontologists have a hard time recreating the real 
Ordovician period, which ended about 443 million years ago, the perceptions 
about modern culture drawn from spam are quite misleading (and humorous): 
"Little is known of the physiology of the Ordovician body, but the outward 
appearance was greatly enhanced by drugs which shaped one to look more like 
those celebrated in Ordovician PORNOGRAPHY. These pills occasionally took 
the form of patches and other accessories. It is believed that, for a time, 
these patches took on significance as ultimately ceremonial jewelry," reads 
one of the plaques in the show. The display is on view at the Spaceworks 
Gallery in Manhattan through Feb. 7. (AP 27 Jan 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040127/D80B6G5O0.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "There is nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't 
set it right in the course of an afternoon." (Jean Giraudoux)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE SOPRANOS IN ACADEMIA
      English professor David Lavery is one of several academics who have 
become fascinated with the psycho-dynamics revealed by the mafiaesque 
characters that populate HBO's popular Sopranos series:
      "Midway through the first season of The Sopranos, the protagonist's 
psychotherapist, Jennifer Melfi, has a not-exactly-traditional family 
dinner with her middle-class Italian parents, son, and ex-husband Richard 
La Penna. She lets slip (hmm!) that one of her patients is a mobster, much 
to Richard's consternation. An activist in Italian anti-defamation 
politics, he is incensed at the opprobrium the Mafia has brought on all 
Italians. What is the point, he protests, of trying to help such a person? 
In a subsequent scene he contemptuously dismisses Jennifer and her 
profession for purveying "cheesy moral relativism" in the face of evil. His 
challenge boldly proclaims what until then has been implicit: the richest 
and most compelling piece of television--no, of popular culture-that I've 
encountered in the past twenty years is a meditation on the nature of 
morality, the possibility of redemption, and the legacy of Freud.
      "To be sure, The Sopranos is much else as well. For two years (the 
third season began 4 March 2001) David Chase's HBO series has served up a 
hybrid genre of post-Godfather decline-of-the-mob movie and soap opera, 
with plenty of sex, violence, domestic melodrama, and comic irony; a 
portrait of a suburban landscape that does for northern New Jersey what 
film noir did for Los Angeles, with soundtrack to match; a deft depiction 
of class and cultural relations among various subgroups and generations of 
Italian-Americans; a gloss on the manners and mores of the fin-de-siècle 
American middle-class family; and perfect-pitch acting, especially James 
Gandolfini as Tony Soprano; Edie Falco as his complicated wife, Carmela; 
Lorraine Bracco as Dr. Melfi; and the late Nancy Marchand as the Sopranos' 
terrifying matriarch, Livia.
      "Cumulatively, these episodes have the feel of an as yet unfinished 
nineteenth-century novel. While the sheer entertainment and suspense of the 
plot twists are reminiscent of Dickens and his early serials, the 
underlying themes evoke George Eliot: the world of Tony Soprano is a kind 
of postmodern Middlemarch, whose inhabitants' moral and spiritual 
development (or devolution) unfolds within and against the norms of a 
parochial social milieu. This era being what it is, however, the Sopranos' 
milieu has porous boundaries, and the norms that govern it are a moving 
target. In one scene, the family is in mid-breakfast when Tony and 
Carmela's teenage daughter, Meadow, apropos a recent scandal brought on a 
high school classmate's affair with her soccer coach, declaims about the 
importance of talking openly about sex. Yes, Tony agrees, but not during 
breakfast. 'Dad, this is the 1990s,' Meadow protests. 'Outside it may be 
the 1990s,' Tony retorts, 'but in this house it's 1954.' It's wishful 
thinking, and Tony knows it. What 1950s gangster would take Prozac and make 
weekly visits to a shrink -- or, for that matter, have a daughter named 
Meadow?"
                                 ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0231127804/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "This Thing of Ours" (David Lavery, ed.) -- or look for it in your 
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to 
adult literacy programs.)

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