NewsScan Daily, 22 October 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 22 October 2003 ("Above The Fold")
***********************************************************
NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization
making significant and sustained contributions to the effective
management and appropriate use of information technology. NSD is
written by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, [email protected].
***********************************************************

"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Dell Set to Launch LCD TV Line
        Yahoo Deploys E-Mail Decoys
        Public Videoconferencing System Opens Window on the World
        Amazon in the Black
        Intel to California: We're Outta Here

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Jamestown, Virginia
        Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age (By Chey & Stephen Cobb)

DELL SET TO LAUNCH LCD TV LINE
Dell is moving into home entertainment, following the lead of rival Gateway 
with a new 17-inch LCD-screen television priced at $699. Gateway sells a 
similar model, also for $699. Dell also plans to roll out a portable music 
player that incorporates a small hard drive similar to the one inside the 
Apple iPod. "We're expanding our lineup, even as our PC business is 
profitable in every segment," says CEO Michael Dell. Meanwhile, analysts 
say LCD TVs are a good bet for Dell -- they're one of the fastest growing 
segments in consumer electronics today, with worldwide shipments up 223% in 
the first quarter of 2003 from the previous year's. (CNet News.com 21 Oct 
2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-5094729.html

YAHOO DEPLOYS E-MAIL DECOYS
Yahoo now offers its e-mail customers a new way to evade spam -- its 
AddressGuard feature allows subscribers to create a fictitious "base name" 
and then up to 500 variations on that name that can be used in online 
shopping and banking transactions as well as online community discussions. 
If an address starts to draw spam, it can be discarded and another one 
selected. Yahoo's anti-spam arsenal also includes new spam-blocking 
software along with the option to receive e-mail only from known sources. 
Yahoo has also changed its rule on viruses, now requiring users to scan all 
attachments before downloading them. Yahoo VP Brad Garlinghouse says the 
company has to keep tweaking its technical defenses because legal battles 
can't do the job alone. "Legislation and litigation, it's something of a 
whack-a-mole problem," he says, referring to the arcade game where players 
are challenged to hit an ever-increasing number of pop-up figures. An 
August survey of Yahoo users found that 77% said they would rather clean a 
toilet than sort through the junk e-mail in their in-box. (Reuters 21 Oct 
2003)
http://news.excite.com/tech/article/id/281288|technology|10-21-2003::00:04|reuters.html

PUBLIC VIDEOCONFERENCING SYSTEM OPENS WINDOW ON THE WORLD
Austrian cameraman Andreas Traint is the brains behind a giant 
videoconferencing system that will deploy in London and Vienna next year, 
using 10-foot-tall cylindrical TV screens located in public areas to beam 
life-size images 24 hours a day. Dubbed the Tholos System -- after the 
Greek word for a circular building -- the booths are 23 feet in diameter 
and feature a collection of HDTV cameras and projectors mounted inside. 
"It's way cooler than a projected image," says Tholos managing director 
Michael Brezina. "It's like seeing a person, really lifelike, standing in 
front of you." The company plans to establish systems in Paris, Rome, 
Warsaw and Copenhagen as well, and is hoping to establish systems in the 
U.S. and Canada for global coverage by 2010 or 2011. The systems will be 
free to users, with costs covered by advertising, which will consume about 
13% of air time. German marketing exec André Felker says the new medium is 
drawing a lot of attention from potential advertisers. "It's not just a 
technical innovation. You can talk to people in other towns and see them 
and hear their voices. There's no other medium that can transport these 
real emotions." (Wired.com 22 Oct 2003)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60914,00.html

AMAZON IN THE BLACK
Amazon.com, the ever-expanding dot-com company that scored huge successes 
in building its business without ever turning a profit, has swung to a 
profit for the third quarter (as a consequence of sales surging 33% in a 
strong back-to-school season as well as favorable exchange rates). Chief 
Financial Officer Tom Szkutak says simply: "We had great growth and we're 
cautiously optimistic about the future." Industry analyst Dan Geiman's 
assessment of Amazon's profitability on the company's good financial news 
is: "Taken on its own merit, it was a great quarter for them. But if you 
look at it from an investor's standpoint, they didn't beat expectations by 
quite as much as they did in the past, and the guidance for 2004 is a 
little conservative compared to what you've seen over the past quarters." 
(AP/San Jose Mercury News)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/7075079.htm

INTEL TO CALIFORNIA: WE'RE OUTTA HERE
Intel chief executive Craig Barnett says his company -- one of the biggest 
success stories of California's Silicon Valley -- has ruled out any plans 
to expand in that state, because of what he characterized as 20 years of 
political mismanagement of the California economy. "California has to treat 
business as something it has to attract and nurture." Over the past decade, 
Oregon has displaced California as the state with the largest number of 
Intel employees, and Arizona now has more Intel employees than Silicon 
Valley, where the company's headquarters remain. Barrett notes  that, while 
much of the world seeks to lure high-tech businesses, California is focused 
on providing  support to such "19th century" industries as agriculture, 
steel and shrimp farming. He also pointed out that India, China and Russia 
alone now have somewhere between 250 million and 500 million highly 
educated knowledge workers between them, a number that surpasses not just 
the population of California but that of the entire U.S. (Reuters/21 Oct 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/techcorporatenews/2003-10-21-intel 
-rips-cali_x.htm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in 
it." (Phillip K. Dick)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: JAMESTOWN, VIRGINIA
      Business reporter and historian David A. Price has written an 
engaging new history of Jamestown de-romanticizing what was actually a 
business venture:
      "The names of John Smith and Pocahontas have by now passed into 
American legend. Like the Jamestown story as a whole, their stories have 
been told over the generations with varying degrees of accuracy. The 
imaginative 1995 Walt Disney Co. movie, for example, endowed Pocahontas 
with a Barbie-doll figure, dressed her in a deerskin from Victoria's 
Secret, and made her Smith's love interest.
      "Trouble is, Smith and Pocahontas were never romantically involved. 
That isn't surprising; when Smith was in Virginia, Pocahontas was a girl of 
eleven or so. The real Pocahontas was a child of privilege in her society 
-- that is, the Powhatan Empire -- who was curious about the English 
newcomers, befriended Smith, and gave him and the rest of the English 
crucial assistance. Years later, looking back on her contributions, Smith 
would recall that her "compassionate pitiful [pitying] heart ... gave me 
much cause to respect her." He credited her with saving the colony. The 
English in Virginia, for their part, chose a strange way to repay her: 
after Smith left the colony, they kidnapped her and held her hostage for 
ransom from her father, Chief Powhatan. Yet during that time, she came to 
embrace English ways, married a thoroughly lovestruck Englishman named John 
Rolfe, and lived out the rest of her short life in his country.
      "Unlike most Englishmen of his day, Smith believed it was important 
to understand and deal with the natives as they actually were, not as 
symbols of primitive evil or virtue. Accordingly, he studied the Powhatan 
language and culture closely, and indeed, he left behind our most detailed 
ethnographic writings on those people. With the benefit of that 
information, he was able to keep Chief Powhatan at bay through a mix of 
diplomacy and intimidation -- not through massacre -- at a time when the 
Powhatan Empire outnumbered the English by well over a hundred to one. It 
was this record that led several of Smith's admirers among the colonists to 
write later, with only slight exaggeration, that "thou Virginia foild'st, 
yet kep'st unstained" -- that is, he foiled the natives in Virginia, but 
didn't stain Virginia with their blood."
                           **
See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375415416/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for David A. Price, "Love And Hate In Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, 
and the Heart of a New Nation" -- or look for it in your favorite library. 
(We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.)

SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBER AGE: "PERIMETER SECURITY"
   In this issue of NewsScan Daily our security experts Stephen Cobb and 
Chey Cobb talk about "perimeter security":
               ***
      The mail order shopping season arrived with a thud and a smile last 
week when our cheerful postal carrier deposited an armload of glossy 
catalogues on the doorstep. Most went straight to the trash can, which is 
strategically placed between the mailbox and our front door. But one caught 
our eye and made the cut: "Gifts for Computer Geeks."
      What kind of gifts? Most items are objects emblazoned with verbal and 
visual jabs, digs, and slurs directed at Microsoft and Microsoft Windows, 
many deriding its security. Which was somewhat poetic because the catalogue 
arrived on the same day that Microsoft issued five critical alerts, warning 
of four serious vulnerabilities in Windows and one in Exchange 2000 Server. 
Any one of these, if exploited on your system, could enable an outsider to 
remotely execute code of his or her choice (like Copy, Delete, Format, and 
so on).
      Besides urging people to apply the patches, Microsoft suggested that 
system administrators disable downloading of ActiveX controls in the 
Internet zone, restrict Web sites to only trusted sites, install Outlook 
Email Security Update (if they're using Outlook 2000 SP1 or earlier), or 
read email as plain text in Outlook 2002. All of which sounds a lot like 
"don't use some of the features we used to tout the software, because we 
now realize they are insecure."
      Two of the five security problems were buffer overflow 
vulnerabilities (one in Microsoft Local Troubleshooter ActiveX control, the 
other in Messenger Service, both which are installed by default by some 
versions of Windows). In previous columns we have noted that any 
respectable pre-release security review of software code should include 
what friend and fellow CISSP David Brussin calls "vulnerability class 
analysis," in which you identify and fix all examples of something like 
buffer overflow at once, instead of relying on a steady drip of patches.
      Signs that the public is getting tired of the ship-then-patch 
situation also emerged last week, in the form of a class-action lawsuit 
seeking damages from Microsoft for its "reliance on patches for fixing 
security holes in its Windows operating system." The lawsuit, filed in Los 
Angeles District Court, claims that Microsoft's failure to keep Windows 
secure "puts users' personal data at risk." And although a Microsoft 
spokesperson was quick to assert that the real villains were the writers of 
worms and viruses, frustrated consumers are likely to equate that with a 
manufacturer of defective tires claiming that the real fault lies with 
nails and potholes.
      So it was interesting to hear what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had to 
say recently: "Microsoft is now designing technology to shield Windows from 
malicious email messages, viruses and worms." In other words (those of 
Orlando Ayala, Microsoft's former sales chief now heading its sales push to 
small and midsize businesses): "We are going to start putting more emphasis 
on what we call securing the perimeter."
      What does that mean to the way companies and organizations handle 
network security? It means a renewed emphasis on technology such as 
firewalls (according to Ayala it "speaks of a deep partnership with the 
firewall world"). As you may know, a firewall controls the flow of traffic 
between two networks, such as your office network and the Internet (a 
"personal firewall" can control the traffic between your PC and the Internet).
      Firewalls control traffic based on rules you establish. A common rule 
is that your company network will not accept connection requests from the 
Internet if the computer making the request has the same address as a 
computer on your company network. This foils attempts to "spoof" one of the 
computers that your network trusts on the basis of its location inside the 
firewall. Firewalls are very effective at blocking many, but not all, types 
of attack that can be launched from one network or machine against another. 
However, the firewall has to allow some traffic to pass through: the stuff 
that people want. This includes email, even if that email is unwanted or 
infected.
      You might think most networks of any size these days have a firewall 
in front of them, and you'd be right. So clearly Microsoft is talking about 
something beyond basic firewalling. We don't know what that is exactly, but 
one new form of firewalling is something that Stephen's company has been 
working on. This technology does not check every single packet of 
information coming across the connection, but it samples them and decides 
if the data flowing over this connection is desirable or not. That decision 
determines how much bandwidth is allocated to the traffic. If the traffic 
is undesirable (a load of spam for example), then the traffic is slowed to 
a trickle. The good e-mail still comes through, but a lot of the bad stuff 
never makes it (spammers can't afford to wait for their messages to be 
delivered).
      This technology is called SpamSquelcher and, as the name suggests, 
its primary use today is to keep spam off networks. But it could easily be 
expanded to provide other forms of perimeter protection, complementing 
traditional firewalls so that when they allow stuff in, it is never too 
much of the wrong stuff.
      Finally, to be fair and balanced, we must applaud Mr. Ballmer's 
concurrent announcement that Windows will ship with an Internet firewall 
turned on by default. And Windows XP users should note that it does include 
a personal firewall, and they should probably turn it on. Then apply the 
latest round of security patches from www.windowsupdate.com
      [Chey Cobb, CISSP, the author of Network Security for Dummies, is an 
independent consultant (www.cheycobb.com) and a former senior technical 
security advisor to the NRO. She can be emailed as chey at patriot dot net. 
Stephen Cobb, CISSP, helped developed SpamSquelcher, a new kind of network 
perimeter security device. He can be emailed as scobb at eprivacygroup dot 
com.]

SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY:
      To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions 
of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages 
(i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to 
the addresses shown below:
      Text version: Send message to [email protected]
      HTML version: Send mail to [email protected]
      NewsScan-To-Go: http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html

TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog: 
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html

***********************************************************
Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan 
Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our 
editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is 
a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities, 
national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with 
remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are 
long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member 
institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source 
material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at 
http://www.rlg.org.

*********

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an 
e-mail message to [email protected] with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' 
in the subject line. To subscribe to our HTML version of NewsScan Daily, 
send mail to [email protected], with the word 'subscribe' as the 
subject. (Subscribing to the HTML version won't automatically unsubscribe 
you from the text version; please unsubscribe yourself as explained above.) 
Please note: To unsubscribe from an account to which you no longer have 
access, send mail to at [email protected].

*********

We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the 
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news 
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold" 
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to 
the point! See http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl 
<[email protected]> and Suzanne Douglas <[email protected]>, or call 
770-704-7517.

*********

Get a free 6-week trial subscription to Innovation Weekly, an executive 
summary of trends, strategies and innovations in business and technology. 
Send mail to [email protected] with the word 'subscribe' in the 
subject line.

What customized news and information services do you need for your company? 
Get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 770-704-7517 to talk 
over the possibilities.

Copyright 2003. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************