• The Goss
• Bard farce
• Techno Page
• Fancy a date with Noel?
• Margins
• How d'ya like Sydney?
• Why, oh why, do they do it?
• Regenesis
• Travails of train travel
• Fine portrayal of Shakespeare
• Poetic achievement
• A room of my own
• 

The Goss

Pitt and Aniston sue ring maker

The rings were made by Damiani, of white gold and diamonds with Aniston's engraved with the words "Brad 2000", and Pitt's bearing the words "Jen 2000". The couple alleges that Damiani agreed never to reproduce them. The complaint charges that Damiani had obtained "the kind of publicity that money can't buy" by replicating the rings and selling them on the Internet and at stores in Las Vegas, Nevada and Palm Desert, California. 

The lawsuit seeks an injunction against Damiani to prevent the company from selling the rings and using the names and images of the Hollywood celebrity couple in its advertising. The complaint alleges that Damiani named the jewellery "Brad and Jennifer white-gold wedding bands with diamonds". 

Damiani representatives could not be reached for comment. 

Oh, nuts!

Willis weeps 

During his courageous fight, Bruce, 46, tried everything he could to save his fatally ill brother. He even offered to fly Robert anywhere in the world on his private jet to seek treatment.

But when doctors told him there was nothing more to do, the caring actor took Robert, 42, back to his L.A. home so he could spend his last days in dignity.

"Bruce is shattered," a family friend says. "Day and night he searched for a miracle for Bob, but it never happened," says a family friend. Adds an insider: "Even with his millions, there was nothing Bruce could do." For months, Bruce put his career on the back burner to tend to his younger brother, as the prospect of Robert's death hung over the family like a "huge black cloud", reveals a source. "We loved him very much," wept Bruce. "He was a good brother and a wonderful son to our parents. We will sorely miss him."

Jurassic Park III roars to no. 1

The film, which pits Sam Neill, Téa Leoni, and William H. Macy against the computer-generated beasties, easily devoured the box office this weekend by drumming up an estimated $50.3 million to America's Sweetheart's second-placing $31 million.

While Universal is on an amazing box-office roll with three consecutive $40 million plus openings this summer (The Mummy Returns and The Fast and the Furious also had monster debuts), the weekend sales for JPIII were far short of the record-holding three-day numbers of the second Jurassic film. 

Jurassic Park opened in June of 1993 with $50.1 million and was passed up by The Lost World: Jurassic Park's May 1997 opening of $72.1 million, a three-day box-office record that still stands, despite onslaughts from Stars Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace ($64.8 million) and this year's The Mummy Returns ($68.1 million). 

JPIII's debut now ranks as the fourth-biggest July opener, behind X-Men, Men in Black, and Independence Day. Steven Spielberg directed the first two films, but handed over directing reins this time out to Jumanji helmer Joe Johnston. 

Benicio on the mend in Cuba

"I have to have this on for at least four weeks," the Puerto Rican-born star said at a news conference, when asked about the sling on his arm. "After that, there is rehabilitation; then I can restart filming," he added. Del Toro made the announcement while on a tour in Havana, Cuba, to promote Traffic, the acclaimed film about drug-trafficking that earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and its director, Stephen Soderbergh, a Best Director Oscar. 

Del Toro, Soderbergh, and Traffic's producer, Laura Bickford, have hosted free screenings of the film to the Communist-ruled island nation, which is under a U.S. embargo. Bickford said the response from the Cuban public had been positive: "Everybody has come up and said they like it." Del Toro spoke about the need to increase the presence of Hispanic and Latino actors in Hollywood. "The reality is that Latinos must do it themselves," he said. "Neither the studio nor anyone else is going to do it for them." 

Bard farce

The members of Stagefright&Panic, have announced their intention to perform the complete works of William Shakespeare in one single theatrical experience. This attempt is alleged to include all 37 plays and 154 sonnets of Shakespeare. The actors of Stagefright&Panic have been seen prowling the streets muttering blank verse in a suspicious and bizarre manner. Last week, three innocent bystanders had to be treated for severe shock and trauma after bumping into the actors who were evidently in a crazed mood after rehearsals. 

In a faxed statement this group has threatened to perform the complete works of William Shakespeare in two hours. We publish below a photograph of this renegade group of actors. Should you know of their whereabouts or see them within the city limits please inform the nearest authority. This diabolical plan to perform the complete works is set to take effect at the Lionel Wendt in August. Read The Sunday Times and listen to YES FM as we bring you the latest on the plot to bombard the bard.

Techno Page

By Harendra Alwis

Securing electronic transactions

Yet, news about a hacker who by most accounts is little more than an amateur raised a chilling question for E-commerce: if it's that easy to get someone else's credit card number, should consumers believe industry hype about how safe it is to buy things online?

Unfortunately, at least in some rare cases, using credit cards online is not safe. But the danger probably lies as much in aging technology as in the fluid nature of the Internet. For example, older browser software does not include the same capacity for encrypting information entered in online forms as the newest versions. But take heart, advances in encryption are making the online marketplace more secure all the time.

Also, some Internet Service Providers don't yet have the ability to block attacks by hackers hoping to invade their systems with "packet-sniffing" programs that troll for hidden data, or they might not be able to discover such attacks until it is too late.

Accordingly, the arrest of the 36-year-old hacker, charged with pilfering more than 100,000 credit card numbers online, could present a unique opportunity for us to spot the loopholes in order to patch them up. Last month, the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) 1.0 standard saw light. The new technology, designed to ensure the integrity of encrypted data in credit card transactions, has financial giants such as MasterCard International Inc. and Visa International Inc. banking on it to make E-commerce as commonplace as catalogue shopping via telephone.

The good news is that newer technologies will make attacks like the packet-sniffing ploy much harder to carry out, and quicker to discover if they do succeed, analysts said.

The advent of standards such as SET will provide a guarantee of a level of data-scrambling that will be hard for any but the most dedicated and well-equipped hackers to crack, according to officials from companies involved in developing the SET standard.

The SET consortium, which besides MasterCard and Visa also includes Microsoft Corp., IBM, Netscape Communications Corp. and other major players in the Internet space, has been tinkering with SET for more than a year. SET defines how a credit card is to be handled online in four steps; the consumer, the merchant, the issuing bank and the credit card association.

But SET's developers, who also plan to debut SET-compliant software-testing centres, hope it can become the stamp of approval for ensuring that a credit card transaction is protected. As one developer put it, "We're talking about encryption that's not far off from what we're using for the nuclear codes." 

Storing credit card numbers securely

Most of this information is encrypted using very complex algorithms. Fo example, RSA is a public-key cryptosystem developed by MIT professors: Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Adleman in 1977 in an effort to help ensure Internet security. As Steve Burnett of RSA Data Security, Inc. described it, a cryptosystem is simply an algorithm that can convert input data into something unrecognizable (encryption), and convert the unrecognizable data back to its original form (decryption). 

As complex as they are, most algorithms employ a very simple principle. They employ one-way gates to generate encryptions with as much entropy and randomness as possible. If f(x) is a function of ëxí, while it is easy to find out the answer for a given value of ëxí, it is almost impossible to trace back the exact function that generated a particular number. This system is used in the transfer information over the Internet including emails.

If you want to find out more about encryption visit www.orst.edu/dept/honors/makmur/ and www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/fip186.htm

Sources: cnn.com, znet.com, Nalin Thomas

Side bar

MPEG - Moving Picture Experts Group: a standards committee, supported by the ISO, formed to establish uniform methodologies and algorithms for digital audio and video compression.

Motion-JPEG - A derivative of JPEG that includes some key frame-based compression to make it suitable for video.

DirectX - This Microsoft Windows API was designed to provide software developers with direct access to low-level functions on PC peripherals. Before DirectX, programmers usually opted for the DOS environment, which was free of the limited multimedia feature set that characterized Windows for many years. 

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