In search of Earth, new class of planets found

By Michael Coren Tuesday, August 31, 2004 Posted: 7:27 PM EDT (2327 GMT)

This illustration shows the second
planet, which orbits around the star 55 Cancri, which lies some 41 light-years
from Earth.

(CNN) -- Our planet is not alone. It may not even
be lonely.

Astronomers on Tuesday announced the discovery of a new -- and possibly abundant -- class of planets that has more in common with Earth than the uninhabitable gas giants previously discovered.

"We are closer to answering the question, 'Are we alone in the universe?'" said Anne Kinney, director of NASA's Universe Division, Science Mission Directorate. "We aim to answer that question by looking for planets, eventually imaging them and ultimately diagnosing the presence of life on those planets."

Astronomers found the two planets, among the smallest ever detected, orbit different stars less then 50 light years from Earth. One planet circles a red dwarf star, the most abundant in our Milky Way galaxy, igniting hope that the discoveries may just be the beginning.

"We would like to make these discoveries routine and eventually push into the 'super Earth' regime," said Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley, who discovered a planet orbiting working with R. Paul Butler at the
Carnegie Institution of Washington.

With evidence of smaller, rocky planets growing, finding another Earth seems more likely.

"It appears that most if not the majority of the remaining 100 billion stars [in the Milky Way galaxy] have some sort of planets orbiting around them," said Butler. "We are edging closer and closer to planet systems that are like our own
solar system."

Using a technique that measures the "wobble" of a star caused by a planet's gravitational pull, astronomers inferred the existence of the two extraterrestrial worlds, or exoplanets, as well as traits such as their mass, orbit and speed. The star's movement, or wobble, is found by measuring the Doppler effect on light. The wavelength of the star's light lengthens, or stretches, as it moves with the gravitational pull of the planet reveals much about the planet itself..

The announcement follows on the heels of another by Swiss planet hunters who claimed to discover another planet even smaller than the one announced on Monday. That would add another instance to the new class of planets, although astronomers at Tuesday's conference said recognition of the claim would first require acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal.

There has been an explosion in the number of astronomers scanning the skies for the telltale wobble of distant worlds. Already, about 135 large exoplanets have been discovered. By refining their methods, astronomers can now detect objects even smaller than Saturn. Eventually, they have their sights set on discovering a world the size of our own.

Both of the recently discovered planets are slightly larger than Earth, about the size of Neptune, or about 17 times the size of our planet. Because they are so close to their star, they race through an extraterrestrial "year" in a matter of days.

Beyond that, astronomers can't speculate much about their appearance. They may consist of spheres of gas like Jupiter or look like Neptune itself with a core of rock and ice surrounded by a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.

Given their proximity to the sun, they could also be like a scorched rock resembling Mercury.

The first planet orbits a cool, reddish dwarf star called Gilese 436 in the Leo constellation. Meticulous observation of the star began in July 2003 and detected the planet believed to be at least 21 times the size of Earth. It completes its orbit at the blazing rate of just 2.64 days instead of Earth's 365 days.

The second planet orbits a yellow star like our own, called 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer, and is part of the first four-planet solar system ever discovered. It is estimated to be about the size of 18 Earths in mass, orbits in 2.81 days and lies about 41 light-years from Earth.

"It's the closest analog we have for our own solar system," said Barbara McArthur, investigator of the study from the University of Texas at Austin.

The planets were discovered using ground-based observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Lick Observatory in California and the McDonald Observatory in Texas. Archived data from the Hubble space telescope was also used.

Both studies will appear in the Astrophysical Journal in December.

NASA will launch a series of missions to find more planets in the future including the Kepler Mission, the Space Interferometry Mission and the Terrestrial Planet Finder to seek out Earth-like worlds.

"These are the three missions that NASA designed to find that pale blue dot orbiting a yellow star that might harbor life," Butler said.

The Internet at 35: Still evolving

NEW YORK (AP) -- Thirty-five years after computer scientists at UCLA linked two bulky computers using a 15-foot gray cable, testing a new way to exchange data over networks, what would ultimately become the Internet remains a work in progress.

University researchers are experimenting with ways to increase its capacity and speed. Programmers are trying to imbue Web pages with intelligence. And work is underway to re-engineer the network to reduce spam and security troubles.

All the while threats loom: Critics warn that commercial, legal and political pressures could hinder the types of innovations that made the Internet what it is today.

Stephen Crocker and Vinton Cerf were among the graduate students who joined UCLA professor Len Kleinrock in an engineering lab on September 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers. By January, three other "nodes" joined the fledgling network.

Then came e-mail a few years later, a core communications protocol called TCP/IP in the late 1970s, the domain name system in the 1980s and the World Wide Web -- now the second most popular application behind e-mail -- in 1990. The Internet expanded beyond its initial military and educational domain into businesses and homes around the world.

Today, Crocker continues work on the Internet, designing better tools for collaboration. And as security chairman for the Internet's key oversight body, he is trying to defend the core addressing system from outside threats, including an attempt last year by a private search engine to grab Web surfers who mistype addresses.

He acknowledges the Internet he helped build is far from finished, and changes are in store to meet growing demands for multimedia. Network providers now make only "best efforts" at delivering data packets, and Crocker said better guarantees are needed to prevent the skips and stutters now common with video.

Cerf, now at MCI Inc., said he wished he could have designed the Internet with security built-in. Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., among others, are currently trying to retrofit the network so e-mail senders can be authenticated -- a way to cut down on junk messages sent using spoofed addresses.

Among Cerf's other projects: a next-generation numbering system called IPv6 to accommodate the ever-growing armies of Internet-ready wireless devices, game consoles, even dog collars. Working with NASA, Cerf is also trying to extend the network into outer space to better communicate with spacecraft.

But many features being developed today wouldn't have been possible at birth given the slower computing speeds and narrower Internet pipes, or bandwidth, Cerf said.

"With the tools we had then, we did as much as we could reasonably have
done," he said.

While engineers tinker with the Internet's core framework, some university researchers looking for more speed are developing separate systems that parallel the Internet. That way, data-intensive applications like video conferencing, brain imaging and global climate research won't have to compete with e-mail and e-commerce.

Think information highway with an express lane.

Some applications are so data-intensive, they are "simply impractical to do on the current Internet," said Tracy Futhey, chairwoman of the National LambdaRail. The project offers for its members dedicated high-speed lines so data can "get from point A to point B and not have to contend with the other traffic."

LambdaRail recently completed its first optical connection from San Diego, California, to Seattle, Washington, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Jacksonville, Florida. Work on additional links is planned for next year.

Undersea explorer Robert Ballard has used another network, Internet2, to host live, interactive presentations with students and aquarium visitors from the wreck of the Titanic, which he found in 1985.

The Internet's bandwidth can carry only "lousy" video and "can't compete with looking out the window," Ballard said. But with Internet2, "high-definition zoom cameras can show them the eyelids."

Internet2, with speeds 100 times the typical broadband service at home, is now limited to selected universities, companies and institutions, but researchers expect any breakthroughs to ultimately migrate to the main Internet.

While Internet2 and LambdaRail seek to move data faster and faster, researchers with the World Wide Web Consortium are trying to make information smarter and smarter. Semantic Web is a next-generation Web designed to make more kinds of data easier for computers to locate and process.

Consider the separate teams of scientists who study genes, proteins and chemical pathways. With the Semantic Web, tags are added to information in databases describing gene and protein sequences. One group may use one scheme and another team something else; the Semantic Web could help link the two. Ultimately, software could be written to process the data and make inferences that previously required human intervention.

With the same principles, searching to buy an automobile in Massachusetts will also incorporate listings for cars in Boston.

Change doesn't come easily, however. For instance, the IPv6 numbering system was deemed an Internet standard about five years ago, but the vast majority of software and hardware today still runs on the older IPv4, which is rapidly running out of room.

And the Internet faces general resistance from old-world forces that want to preserve their current ways of doing things: Companies that value profit over greater good. Copyright holders who want to protect their music and movies. Governments that seek to censor information or spy on its citizens.

In early August, the Federal Communications Commission declared that Internet-based phone calls should be subject to the same type of law enforcement surveillance as cell and landline phones. That means Internet service providers would have to design their systems to permit police wiretaps.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, fears a slippery slope. As these outside pressures meddle with the Net's open architecture, he said, there's less opportunity for experimentation and for innovations like the World Wide Web, born out of an unauthorized project at a Swiss nuclear research lab.

Doctors grow new jaw in man's back

LONDON, England (AP) -- A German who had his lower
jaw cut out because of cancer has enjoyed his first meal in nine years -- a bratwurst
sandwich -- after surgeons grew a new jaw bone in his back muscle and transplanted
it to his mouth in what experts call an "ambitious'' experiment.

According to this week's issue of The Lancet medical journal, the German doctors used a mesh
cage, a growth chemical and the patient's own bone marrow, containing stem cells, to create a new jaw bone that fit exactly into the gap left by the cancer surgery. Tests have not been done yet to verify whether the bone was created by the blank-slate stem cells and it is too early to tell whether the jaw will function normally in the long term.

But the operation is the first published report of a whole bone being engineered and incubated inside a patient's body and transplanted.

Stem cells are the master cells of the body that go on to become every tissue in the body. They are a hot area of research with scientists trying to find ways to prompt them to make desired tissues, and perhaps organs.

But while researchers debate whether the technique resulted in a scientific advance involving stem cells, the operation has achieved its purpose and changed a life, said Stan Gronthos, a stem cell expert at the Institute of medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide, Australia.

"A patient who had previously lost his mandible (lower jaw) through the result of a destructive tumor can now sit down and chew his first solid meals in nine years ...resulting in an improved quality of life,'' said Gronthos, who was not connected with the experiment.

The operation was done by Dr. Patrick Warnke, a reconstructive facial surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany. The patient, a 56-year-old man, had his lower jaw and half his tongue cut out almost a decade ago after getting mouth cancer. Since then, he had only been able to slurp soft food or soup from a spoon.

In similar cases, doctors can sometimes replace a lost jawbone by cutting out a piece of bone from the lower leg or from the hip and chiseling it to fit into the mouth.

This patient could not have that procedure because he was taking a potent blood thinner for another condition and doctors considered it too dangerous to harvest bone from elsewhere in his body since extraction leaves a hole where the bone is taken, creating an extra risk of bleeding.

Artificial jaws made from plastic or other materials are not used because they pose too much of a risk of infection.

"He demanded reconstruction,'' Warnke said. "This patient was really sick of living.''

Warnke and his group began by creating a virtual jaw on a computer, after making a three-dimensional scan of the patient's mouth.

The information was used to create a thin titanium micro-mesh cage. Several cow-derived
pure bone mineral blocks the size of sugar lumps where then put inside the structure, along with a human growth factor that builds bone and a large squirt of blood extracted from the man's bone marrow, which contains stem cells.

The surgeons then implanted the mesh cage and its contents into the muscle below the patient's right shoulder blade. He was given no drugs, other than routine antibiotics to prevent infection from the surgery.

The implant was left in for seven weeks, when scans showed new bone formation. It was removed about eight weeks ago, along with some surrounding muscle and blood vessels, put in the man's mouth and connected to the blood vessels in his neck.

Scans showed new bone continued to form after the transplant.

Four weeks after the operation, the man ate a German sausage sandwich, his first real meal in nine years. He eats steak now, but complains to his doctor that because he has no teeth he has to cut it into such small pieces that by the time he gets to the end of the steak, it's cold.

He has reported no pain or any other difficulties associated with the transplant, Warnke said, adding that he hopes to be able to remove the mesh and implant teeth in the new jaw about a year from now.

Paul Brown, head of the Center for Tissue Regeneration Science at University College in London, said it's not clear any major scientific ground has been broken, and tests may not be able to show whether the new bone came from stem cells, rather than from the growth factor alone.

The operation put established techniques together, resembling a well-known experiment in which University of Massachusetts scientists grew a human ear using a mold on the back of a mouse in 1995, he said.

"If you put loads of blocks of bone mineral into a hole and you induce cellular activity by putting in growth factors, it's a standard approach that people have used to induce the body's own response,'' said Brown, who was not connected with the study. "Clearly some of them are going to work and it sounds like for this patient, this has worked.''

Biopsies of the jaw bone could later provide some answers in the quality of the bone, experts said.

"Just making the gross tissue shape right isn't really the problem,'' Brown said. "It's what the shape of the tissue is at the microscopic and ultramicroscopic level. That's the architecture which is so tricky and which is what gives function.''

Student Charged With Clogging Toilet

Student Charged With Clogging Toilet

PORT OF SWEET GRASS, Mont. - Jesse Huffman insists he didn't do it on purpose, but the toilet he left plugged after "nature called" at this border crossing in north-central Montana has him facing criminal charges.

Toole County authorities charged the 19-year-old college student from Great Falls with criminal mischief after a border agent accused him of intentionally clogging the toilet.

Huffman said the clogged piping was completely unintentional, the result of an urgent, but natural bodily function.

"I've never been arrested before or anything like that, and I get arrested for taking a dump," said Huffman, a student at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Huffman was returning to Montana from a trip to Lethbridge, Alberta with four friends Saturday. Port authorities stopped their car for what was apparently a random search. The car's 19-year-old driver was cited for illegally possessing alcohol.

Huffman said he asked to use the bathroom while waiting for the driver.

A short time later, a port inspector discovered the toilet was clogged and threatened charges, Huffman said.

Cory Grayson, one of Huffman's friends, said he couldn't believe it when border agents first threatened charges.

"I didn't think they were serious at first, I was just laughing so hard," he said.

Port Director Larry Overcast said he could not comment on the case.

Huffman said he has hired an attorney and intends to fight the charge.

[Yahoo news]

US tops league of e-mail spammers..[Big F'n Suprise]

TOP SPAM NATIONS 1 - United States 42.53% 2 - South Korea 15.42% 3 - China (& Hong Kong)11.62% 4 - Brazil 6.17% 5 - Canada 2.91% 6 - Japan 2.87% 7 - Germany 1.28% 8 - France 1.24% 9 - Spain 1.16% 10 - United Kingdom 1.15% 11 - Mexico 0.98% 12 - Taiwan 0.91% Others 11.76% Source: Sophos August 2004

The US is the biggest spammer, despite efforts to combat unwanted e-mail, according to net security experts.

Almost 43% of all unwanted e-mails originated from the US in the last month, said anti-virus firm Sophos.

The report suggests that anti-spam laws passed in the US nine months ago have had little impact.

South Korea, the most broadband-connected country in the world, was next in line, firing out 15% of all junk e-mails.

"Almost nine months on from the Can-Spam legislation and the US's attempt to clean up its act appears to have had little impact," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos said.

"Canada has made some progress, however, cutting the percentage of the
world's junk e-mail sent from the country by over half, from 6.8% six months ago to 2.9% today."

The figures also showed that South Korea had tripled the amount of spam mails sent out from its networks since February.

Legal action

The Can-Spam Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) was passed by US law-makers in late 2003 and came into force in January this year.

It means spammers can be imprisoned and it also outlaws many of the tactics they use to hide their tracks.

It also requires that unsolicited e-mails should include a way for recipients
to "opt-out" of receiving future e-mails.

Only net service providers and governments can use the Can-Spam Act to tackle spammers.

In March, AOL, Microsoft, Earthlink and Yahoo filed lawsuits against
individuals in the US who they claimed used open proxies to send spam through innocent third-parties and used false "from" e-mail addresses.

"Spammers are motivated by watching their bank accounts get fatter and fatter, and many have turned to hacking into innocent third-party computers to send their junk emails," Mr Cluley commented.

"Many of the computers sending out spam are likely to have had their broadband internet connections exploited by remote hackers."

About 40% of global spam is sent out via "zombie computers", machines which have been harnessed without the knowledge of the PC user, he added.

[BBC]

Scream stolen from Norway museum

Robbers took the work off the wall in broad daylight

Armed robbers
have stolen the iconic Edvard Munch painting, The Scream, from the Munch Museum
in Norway.

Two masked thieves pulled the work and another painting, Madonna, off the wall as stunned visitors watched on Sunday.

One robber threatened staff with a gun before the pair escaped in a waiting car, a museum officer told the BBC.

The car was later recovered and police also found parts of picture frames near to where a witness reported seeing a suspect vehicle.

The Munch Museum said the two stolen paintings were among its most valuable -worth an estimated $19m (£10.4m) together, according to the BBC's Lars Bevanger.

Norwegian Culture Minister Valgerd Svarstad Haugland described the theft as "dreadful and shocking".

"We have not protected our cultural treasures adequately. We must learn the lessons," she said.

The robbers fled with the painting to a waiting car

Jorunn Christofferson, a press officer at the Munch Museum, told the BBC the museum was full of people when the robbers took the two paintings - frames and all - off the walls of the gallery.

Kjell Pedersen of the Oslo police told the Norwegian daily Aftenposten that police had "mobilised all available resources on the ground and in the air".

Nobody was hurt and no shots were fired, Ms Christofferson said.

She said the museum had closed-circuit television that would have captured the event on video, but that the thieves "were wearing black oods, like bank
robbers".

No protection

All you had to do is pull on the painting hard for the cord to break loose - which is what I saw one of the thieves doing Francois Castang, witness

A French radio producer who was in the museum at the time of the theft said security was not very tight.

"What's strange is that in this museum, there weren't any means of protection for the paintings, no alarm bell," Francois Castang told France Inter radio, the Associated Press reported.

"The paintings were simply attached by wire to the walls," he said. "All you had to do is pull on the painting hard for the cord to break loose - which is what I saw one of the thieves doing."

Ms Christofferson said the guards were more concerned with protecting visitors than the paintings.

The museum had not long been open when the thieves struck

"When they threaten the guards with a gun there is not much to be done," she told the BBC.

"They were more concerned with the security of the visitors."

Munch painted several versions of his famous 1893 work.

The Norwegian National Gallery version - considered to be the most significant one - was stolen in 1994 as the Winter Olympic Games began in Lillehammer, Norway.

Demands

The Norwegian government received a demand for a ransom of $1m, but never got proof that those demanding the money had the painting.

An anti-abortion group claimed it could get the painting returned if an
anti-abortion film was broadcast on television.

Police dismissed that claim.

The painting was recovered undamaged in a hotel about 65km (40 miles) south
of Oslo in May 1994. Three Norwegians were arrested in connection with the
theft.

Munch, Norway's best-known artist, died in 1944, aged 81.

Google jumps 18% in debut

No. 1 search engine posts solid gains in long awaited debut, but not like the
late 1990s.

August 19, 2004: 4:36 PM EDT
By Paul R. La Monica, CNN/Money senior writer

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Google stock jumped 18 percent in its long-awaited but rocky debut Thursday.

Shares of the No. 1 search engine company closed at $100.34 after they opened at $100, a 17 percent increase from its offering price of $85.

More than 22 million shares changed hands on its first day of trading, making Google one of the most actively traded stocks on the Nasdaq. The stock stayed in a fairly tight range throughout the day, hitting a low of $95 and high of $104.06.

The slightly better-than-expected performance was not enough to save other tech stocks though; the Nasdaq composite index fell about 0.6 percent Thursday.

Google, trading under the ticker symbol GOOG (GOOG: Research, Estimates), was supposed to be one of the hottest initial public offerings of stock since the late 1990s. But its gains paled next to some of the hottest names of that era.

When the stock finally opened shortly before noon Eastern Time, it was not without a hitch.

It first appeared that the stock had surged 60 percent above its offering price to $135.91. But a Nasdaq official said two trades were prematurely posted before the stock had actually started trading.

The company closed its controversial Dutch auction Wednesday and set its price at the low end of its revised $85 to $95 a share range. Google slashed the price and the size of its offering Wednesday morning, and wound up selling a total of 19.6 million shares.

The offering raised about $1.2 billion for the company, which had originally hoped to sell a total of 25.9 million shares at $108 to $135 a share.

The company's IPO has been anything but smooth. It's been hit by a wave of negative publicity and several regulatory snafus since it filed to go public in late April.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched inquiries into the company's failure to properly register shares awarded to current and former employees as well as an interview that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin did with Playboy just days before Google filed for its IPO.

Testing the market at a tough time

Google was also a victim of poor timing, as shares of tech stocks have been battered for the past month and a half. Shares of Google's competitors, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, have taken an even larger hit than the overall Nasdaq market on concerns about sales growth and lofty valuations.

Yahoo! (YHOO: down $0.37 to $28.11, Research, Estimates) stock edged lower Thursday, leaving it 23 percent below its 52-week high.

Google's opening day market value of $27.2 billion is about 25 percent lower than the $36 billion it would have commanded at $135, the top of its original price range.

But in many respects, the fact that Google merely made it to the market is a victory in itself. High-profile nanotech firm Nanosys withdrew its IPO earlier this month, citing unfavorable market conditions. Several other tech firms, including PlanetOut and Lindows, recently postponed their offerings.

Investors also should not feel too badly for Google's co-founders or CEO Eric Schmidt.

Even though the three made less money than they were originally hoping after cutting how much stock they sold, the remaining holdings for Brin and Page were each worth about $3.8 billion based on Thursday's closing price. Schmidt's stake in Google was worth more than $1.4 billion.

And according to earnings estimates from three analysts who have already published research on Google, the stock is more of a bargain compared to Yahoo! (YHOO: Research, Estimates) following the price cut.

John Tinker of ThinkEquity Partners is forecasting earnings of $2.34 a share for Google in 2005 while Marianne Wolk of Susquehanna Financial Group estimates Google will earn $2.48 a share next year. Martin Pyykkonen with Janco Partners has an earnings target of $2.50 a share.

At the offering price of $85 a share, Google had a P/E of 35 times the $2.44 average of these three estimates. At its closing price, Google's multiple increased to 41. But Yahoo!, by way of comparison, is trading at nearly 60 times 2005 consensus earnings estimates of 47 cents a share.

Google's opening day gain was a bit stronger than many had expected and Tinker attributed that to some of Google's biggest venture capital backers, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, saying in a filing Wednesday they had decided to not sell any of their stake to the public.

Tinker said this restored some confidence in the company because venture capitalists were showing a willingness to hold on to the stock, apparently due to its long-term growth potential, instead of immediately cashing out in the IPO.

"It was the right message. This was a very messy process but when you cut through all the noise, this is an awesome company," Tinker said.

Still, even with the drastically reduced valuation, there was some skepticism about whether Google should be a buy.

"It's still expensive at these levels," said Will Dunbar, managing director with Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm with no stake in Google. "There will be substantial competition in the near future and that's one of the things that gives me pause about the price."

Janco's Pyykkonen adds that he was hearing it was difficult for traders interested in short-selling Google to find shares to borrow from the banks and brokers involved in the auction.

Short sellers borrow stock and quickly sell it with the hopes of buying it back later at a lower price. So there could be some pent-up bearish demand for Google, Pyykkonen said.

And according to an informal poll on CNN/Money, 85 percent of more than 23,000 respondents said that they did not plan on buying shares of Google once it began trading.

Analysts quoted in this story do not own shares of Google or other companies mentioned and their firms have no banking relationships with the companies.

Barret's XM109: No-Hassle 25mm Sniper Rifle

Barrett's prototype XM109 packs no-fuss, some-muss light armor penetration into a convenient point-and-shoot form factor that makes lofting 25mm sniper rounds downrange a relative walk in the park for today's workaday infantryman. Going into testing this month, the XM109 uses the computerized sighting-system "BORS" (Barrett Optical Ranging Sighting System) to automatically compensates for changes in air pressure, temperature, and the angle of the weapon towards the target, "taking all the sweat-math work out of first-round shots." Dial in the distance and take your shot - that armored vehicle should go down in the first round. The XM109 can hold up to five of the 25mm rounds - derived from the dual-purpose (metal and meat) rounds used in the AH-64 Apache helicopter - and can penetrate up to 50 millimeters of armored plating, such as the stuff that protects many of aging SCUD missile launchers.

If given the green light by the armed forces, expect future production versions to incorporate a range-finder, night-vision capability, and sound suppression.

--- Read even more here --- [Gizmodo}

Service Pack 2: It's Out There

Service Pack 2: It's Out There

Service Pack 2 for XP was released to the public
last week and many of you installed it - and wrote to us about your
experiences. Lots of you had no problems at all, but others weren't so
lucky. Following are some of the most common complaints and kudos we're
hearing.

Several readers have mentioned problems with DOS-based games and online games. Others are having problems with peer-to-peer software. The latter is based on the fact that SP2 limits connections per port to 10 (this is to help slow the spread of viruses and
worms such as Sasser), so programs such as eMule, that open connections to a
lot of different destinations, are slowed down, too.

A few users are reporting general slowdowns, although many others say they haven't noticed any change in performance. A few others say XP is faster after the installation. Many say the bootup
process takes slightly longer. Lots of people have complained about the time required to install SP2, typically from half an hour to an hour, depending on your machine.

We've heard that SP2 can slow down your FireWire (IEEE 1394) 800 devices, but that this can be fixed by reinstalling the SP2 FireWire drivers after you install SP2.

We've also heard about conflicts with ZoneAlarm. This is probably because SP2 turns on the Windows Firewall by default. If you use a third party firewall product, you need to turn off the Windows Firewall.

SP2 may affect users of Outlook Web Access (OWA).
If you get your company email from an Exchange server using the OWA Web interface, check out this KB article:

http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=040817ED-KB_883575

Some large companies, including IBM, are telling
their employees not to download and install SP2 until they've had more time
to test it.

On the other hand, the pop-up blocker that SP2 adds to Internet Explorer is getting a big thumbs up. Another new feature that users like is the Add-ons manager. This option is added to the Tools menu and it shows you what has been added to IE and lets you disable them. This is great for turning off those spyware toolbars that get installed
"accidentally."

Destroy Your Data

Make sure there's no signs of your data on your hard drive.

Why do you want to destroy your data in the first place?

• To protect your privacy.


• To prevent others from seeing sensitive data.
  
• To cover your tracks in case you're performing
  confidential activities on your computer.

When it comes to wiping out data, forget about the
Recycle Bin, stupid shareware utilities, or fun little free files.
I'll show you hard-core software and hardware that absolutely,
positively, leaves no trace of the data (or makes the data
practically impossible to use).

Software solutions

Software-based data destruction is perfect for most people to use on
hard drives or floppy disks. If you have financial records, business
secrets, or other sensitive material, use one of the methods below.

• Eraser
  This open source application, perfect for deleting individual
  files, surpasses
  Department of Defense data deletion specifications.
  
• Pretty Good Privacy
  PGP is great for encrypting email, but it also has a file deletion
  utility. With PGP installed, all you have to do is right-click on
  any file and choose Wipe. This deletes and overwrites the target
  file.
  
• Autoclave
  Looking to sell your computer on eBay? Make sure you
  delete the data before you do. You can use Autoclave to create
  a bootable floppy disk that overwrites all hard-drive data.
  Autoclave can overwrite the hard drive with specific data patterns
  that exercise all the bits on the drive, making it extremely
  difficult to recover anything at all.

Software-based data destruction is never as good
as hardware destruction. Any three-letter government agency (FBI,
CIA, NSA) can recover data from software destruction using
high-power microscopes.

Hardware solutions

If you can afford to destroy the media that stores the data, you
increase your probability of maintaining your privacy.

• Fellowes
  PS70-2CD shredder
  Have you ever used a marking pen to write over the data portion of
  a CD you want to dispose? Or better yet, closed your eyes and
  flexed the CD until it shatters? You don't have to do that anymore
  if you buy Fellows' new paper and CD shredder. I haven't been this
  happy about a product since
  Big Nate's BBQ
  brought back the half-slab of ribs for $4.99 on Tuesdays.
  
• Hard drive/floppy degausser
  A degausser is a charged coil that removes all magnetic fields
  from a target device. To use the degausser, you set the hard drive
  or floppy disk upon the device and switch it on. Degaussers are
  expensive and can vary in price based on effective degaussing
  power. Degaussers should be used with a software tool such as
  autoclave.
  
• Acid and thermite
  Acid can be used to dissolve disks. Thermite creates a reaction
  that burns media to a crisp. Realistically, you aren't going to
  use these materials to destroy your media. It's too dangerous and
  not worth the hassle.
  Never attempt to use acid or thermite at home. Using these
  materials can cause severe injury. If you are a commercial company
  considering this method for disk and data destruction, please
  consult your local data destruction specialists.
  
  Thermite is a stable chemical compound that, when ignited, turns into molten
  iron and burns at approximately 3,000 degrees Celsius. This
  wonderful substance is used commercially to weld together railroad
  tracks. But even if you don't hang out in railroad yards, you've
  probably seen this substance in action already.
  
  Remember the Hindenburg? It was a big zeppelin filled with
  hydrogen. As it turns out, it was even more of an accident waiting
  to happen than originally thought. The geniuses who designed this
  diesel-driven death trap wanted to give its outer hull a pretty
  metallic sheen. And what better shiny ingredient to add to the
  paint than, you guessed it, thermite! A research study proved that
  it was indeed a thermite reaction that ignited the zeppelin's
  hydrogen, resulting in the deaths of 38 people. So, please folks,
  don't try this at home or your house may very well end up a
  smoking ruin.