OurHouse.com Puts Up For Sale Sign
Struggling Internet retailer OurHouse Inc. has halted sales operations
after less than two years in business and is in talks to sell its assets,
its CEO said Friday.
The 2-year-old company, which failed to carve out a profitable niche in
the highly competitive home improvement industry, stopped selling
merchandise last month and removed all but the name and logo from its Web
site. OurHouse.com had offered more than 30,000 home-related items including
hardware, household appliances and furniture.
Much of the inventory has been sold to Boston-based SmartBargains, which
announced the acquisition Thursday and added the inventory--gourmet kitchen
products and other housewares--to its Web site, SmartBargains.com.
Government Computers Get Failing Grade for Security
Despite dramatically tighter security at U.S. buildings since the
terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, a House of Representatives panel is giving
the government failing marks for lax protection of federal computer networks
against hackers, terrorists and others.
The "F" grade dropped from the "D" that the government earned in
September 2000. Two-thirds of federal agencies--including the departments of
Defense, Commerce, Energy, Justice and Treasury--flunked the latest computer
security report card.
The grades were based on information the departments gave to the Office
of Management and Budget. As per a new federal law, agencies must report
regularly to the OMB on their efforts to keep computers safe.
Congressional investigators from the General Accounting Office considered
whether agencies had developed security policies or plans, such as limiting
the ability of users to install rogue software.
Comdex Feels Decline in Economy
This year's Comdex will be nothing like those in years past. But that
isn't good news for the show's organizers.
Usually the nearly 200,000 attendees to the must-attend high-tech
conference overrun the Las Vegas area, but early indications show that the
2001 show won't be the extravagant affair that previous shows were.
The show is expected to see a drop in attendance as a result of the
economic problems caused by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Comdex organizer Key3Media expects 50,000 fewer attendees than in 2000,
which means that at approximately 150,000 attendees, it will be the smallest
Comdex crowd since the early 1990s. Only about 750,000 square feet of
convention space will be used by 2,000 vendors, compared with 1 million
square feet and 2,300 vendors last year.
Scientists Acquire IBM's Blue Sky
Scientists expect a powerful new supercomputer to speed their research on
climate changes, droughts and fires.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research and its parent organization,
the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, announced late Thursday
that they are acquiring the IBM SP supercomputer, known as Blue Sky.
IBM spokesman John Buscemi said the computer would top the list of the
world's fastest supercomputers. The updated list, kept by researchers at the
University of Tennessee and the University of Mannheim in Germany, was to be
announced Friday at the Supercomputing 2001 show in Denver.
NCAR's computer initially will be able to perform 2 trillion calculations
per second, more than double the capacity of the center's current computers.
IBM will upgrade the computer next year to bring the machine's peak speed
to 7 trillion calculations per second.
Yahoo! Free of French Court Ruling
A U.S. court ruled yesterday that a French court's finding against Yahoo!
is not enforceable.
A French court had ordered Yahoo! to prevent access by French nationals
to Yahoo! auction sites hosted in the U.S. that, at the time of the French
decision, sold Nazi memorabilia.
Yahoo! argued that the French order would restrain the rights of its
customers to practice freedom of speech, a right guaranteed to Americans in
the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
In the U.S. District Court in Northern California, Judge Jeremy Fogel
upheld the arguments presented by Yahoo! and said the matter was neither a
question of morality nor of French sovereignty. Instead, Fogel said, the
relevant issue was whether or not the French order was consistent with U.S.
law. He found that it was not.
Fogel found the U.S. right to freedom of speech embodied in the First
Amendment to be the dominant legal consideration.
Court Rules Individuals Can Publish Software Codes on Web
A California appeals court this week overturned a decision that had
barred individuals from publishing on the Web a piece of computer code known
as DeCSS, which can be used to break the anti-copying protection used in
DVDs, known as CSS.
The ruling is a significant development in a series of cases concerning
the controversial code, which was first developed by a Norwegian teenager
who claims to have written the software to allow him to play DVDs on his
Linux-based PC. The Linux operating system is incompatible with CSS.
The appeals court ruled that a lower court judge violated the First
Amendment rights of Andrew Bunner by ordering him and other publishers of
the software to remove it from the Internet at the request of the major
movie studios' DVD licensing organization, DVD-CCA. The lower court forbade
Bunner from publishing DeCSS based on claims of trade secret
misappropriation. Bunner had argued that he found the program in the public
domain and simply republished it.
FDA Warns Online Pharmaceutical Companies
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has written to several online
pharmaceutical suppliers, including one based in the United Kingdom, warning
them that their sales to U.S. citizens could be illegal.
In a statement, the FDA said it was taking these steps "to protect the
American public against potentially useless or harmful drugs to treat
anthrax infection that are being marketed by foreign Web sites in defiance
of U.S. laws."
The agency issued warnings to 11 internet vendors in Italy, Canada,
Portugal and other countries that are offering U.S. consumers ciprofloxacin,
the generic name for the drug Cipro. The FDA said it is unable to determine
whether these products were made in accordance with U.S. specifications. If
they were not, sale and distribution of the drugs in the United States may
be illegal.
Adobe Loses in Court
A U.S. court this week denied a move by software giant Adobe to stop
SoftMan, a software retailer, from unbundling Adobe software packages to
sell components of the packages at lower prices. The court ruled that
SoftMan is not bound by Adobe's end-user license.
SoftMan is a Los Angeles-based company that sells software primarily from
its Web site, buycheapsoftware.com. Adobe sued SoftMan, claiming that the
retailer was infringing its copyright and breaching licensing obligations by
unbundling Adobe "collections" and selling the component parts.
Adobe's collections are sets of individual Adobe products, such as Adobe
Photoshop, Pagemaker, Acrobat or Illustrator that are put on separate disks
and sold together in a large Adobe retail box. These bundled products are
offered by Adobe at a discount from the individual retail products composing
the collection.
Each piece of Adobe software is accompanied by an end-user license
agreement, which explains the terms of use for the consumer. The agreement
is electronically recorded on the disk, and customers are asked to agree to
its terms when they attempt to install the software.