NewsScan Daily, 15 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 15 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        'Buffalo Spammer' Could Get Up to Seven Years
        Battle over DVD-Copying Heads to Court
        Linux Users Warned of Intellectual Property Infringement
        Intuit to Stop Using 'Product Activation' Feature
        T-Mobile Scraps Plans for Microsoft Smartphone Launch
        The New White-Collar Crime: Techno-Slacking

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Golda Meir

'BUFFALO SPAMMER' COULD GET UP TO SEVEN YEARS
Howard Carmack, the so-called "Buffalo Spammer," has become the first 
person in New York state to be charged under the state's identity theft 
laws. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 2-1/2 to 7 years in prison for 
identity theft, forgery, criminal possession of forgery devices (in the 
form of software used to create phony return addresses), and falsifying 
business records. According to the indictment, Carmack "stole the 
identities of innocent New Yorkers to spam millions of consumers throughout 
New York and the nation." He is charged with using 343 stolen identities to 
send his unsolicited bulk mailings through Earthlink accounts. An Earthlink 
executive said the main impact of the arrest would be to demonstrate to 
others the "very high cost of doing business" in spam. (New York Newsday 14 
May 2003)
http://www.nynewsday.com/business/ny-biz-spammer0514,0,2414486.story?coll=nyc-business-short-navigation

BATTLE OVER DVD-COPYING HEADS TO COURT
U.S. District Court Judge Susan Ilston in San Francisco will be overseeing 
a case that analysts say will have important ramifications not only for 
software developers and the movie industry, but also for consumers who want 
to make back-ups of the DVDs they buy. Seven major movie studios have filed 
suit against software startup 321 Studios, seeking to prohibit it from 
shipping its DVD X-Copy and DVD Copy Plus software programs. The lawsuit 
invokes the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "anti-circumvention" 
provision, which bans the sale of products that can "get around" copyright 
protection measures. Legal experts say this case is of particular interest 
because Judge Ilston is being asked to clarify whether the law prevents all 
circumvention, or whether there are cases in which circumvention is legal. 
"That's a big open issue that this will help define," says an intellectual 
property lawyer, who adds, "This is one of the first tough cases" to 
address this issue. Courts in the past have allowed copyright exemptions 
for personal use, such as using a VCR to record a TV show for later 
viewing, but up until now those exemptions have not extended to digital 
media. "The court is going to have to come up with a new, nuanced 
interpretation of the statute," says 321 attorney Daralyn Durie. "What's at 
stake here is the ability to engage in fair use in a digital environment." 
(CNet News.com 14 May 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-1001586.html?tag=fd_lede2_hed

LINUX USERS WARNED OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY INFRINGEMENT
The SCO Group, which acquired control of Unix intellectual property from 
Novell after it bought the rights from AT&T back in 1992, has sent letters 
to Linux customers warning that commercial users may face legal liability 
for using Linux with a license from SCO. If SCO's tactic is successful, it 
could undermine one of the basic tenets of the open software movement, of 
which Linux has been the most successful example. Linux is a Unix 
derivative first developed in the 1990s, and has won a loyal following 
because of its low cost, reliability and ability to run on inexpensive 
computer hardware. Linux developer Linus Torvalds says he has not heard 
what parts of Linux might be infringing: "I'd dearly love to hear exactly 
*what* they think is infringing, but they haven't told anybody. Oh well. 
They seem to be more interested in FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] than 
anything else." The latest move follows a $1-billion lawsuit filed by SCO 
in March against IBM, alleging IBM took parts of the Unix code and 
transferred them to Linux. IBM dismissed the lawsuit as unfounded. (AP 14 
May 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030514/D7R1CND00.html

INTUIT TO STOP USING 'PRODUCT ACTIVATION' FEATURE
Intuit says that future versions of its TurboTax tax preparation software 
will be sold without the controversial "product activation" feature that 
angered many Intuit customers. The feature, first installed in TurboTax for 
the 2002 tax year, locks a specific piece of software to a specific PC, 
preventing the use of that software on any PC other than the original 
machine on which it was first activated. Customers have been complaining 
about the activation software since it was first introduced, and attorney 
Stanbury Fishelman says he will continue his lawsuit against Intuit despite 
the company's decision to stop installing it; he promised to "obtain full 
and fair compensation and relief for purchasers and users of the 2002 
TurboTax products." (CNet 14 May 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1046_3-1001649.html

T-MOBILE SCRAPS PLANS FOR MICROSOFT SMARTPHONE LAUNCH
T-Mobile, Europe's No. 2 mobile phone operator, has canceled plans to 
introduce a smartphone powered by Microsoft's SPV software this summer. The 
company had announced plans for the launch in February, but industry 
sources say the SPV software still has "fundamental problems" leading to 
high failure rates. "For the time being, we are not pursuing this project 
further," says a T-Mobile spokesman. (Reuters 15 May 2003)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&ncid=581&e=1&u=/nm/20030515/tc_nm/telecoms_tmobile_microsoft_dc

THE NEW WHITE-COLLAR CRIME: TECHNO-SLACKING
It's getting easier than ever to convince your customers, supervisors and 
employees that you're hard at work -- firing off e-mail messages and 
opening files on your office PC while you're really attending your kids' 
soccer game or sleeping in. Services like GoToMyPC.com enable users to 
manipulate their office computers by remote control -- even going so far as 
to move the cursor on the screen, open documents and print them on the 
networked office printer. E-mail timers allow workers to compose messages 
during the day and then queue them to be sent hours after they've gone to 
bed, giving the impression that they're up burning the midnight oil. 
Instant Message software can be reconfigured so that the "idle" message 
that pops up signaling inactivity is disabled, making users look 
perpetually available. And BlackBerry aficionados can change their settings 
to make on-the-road e-mail look like it came straight from the office PC. 
Psychologists call these activities "impression management," but other see 
signs of a disturbing trend: "If you're out playing golf, and you look like 
you've spent four hours in the office… If everybody does that, the company 
goes bankrupt," says Stuart Gilman, director of the Ethics Resource Center 
in Washington. A recent survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource 
Management found that 59% of HR professionals had personally observed 
employees lying about the number of hours they'd worked, and 53% said 
they'd seen employees lying to a supervisor, a jump of eight percentage 
points in six years. (Wall Street Journal 15 May 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105294526966494700.djm,00.html (sub req'd)

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Each of us inevitable; each of us limitless -- each of us with his 
or her right upon the earth." (Walt Whitman)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: GOLDA MEIR
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir 
(1898-1978), who spent the five years of her premiership motivated by her 
often-stated ambition to see Israel accepted by and living in peace with 
its Arab neighbors. But Mrs. Meir was already out of office when President 
Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt made his dramatic visit to Jerusalem in November 
1977, later confiding to interviewers that he would have preferred to 
negotiate with her because he regarded her as "a tough old lady" who had 
the will to persevere on the road to peace
      Born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev, Ukraine, she came with her family to 
the United States when she was eight years old. Growing up in Milwaukee, 
Wisconsin, with a carpenter father and a shopkeeper mother, she attended 
public schools and the Milwaukee Teacher's Seminary, and then found a job 
teaching school. Later she worked as a librarian in New York and Chicago. 
Her marriage to ardent Zionist Morris Meyerson (later changed to Meir) 
motivated her to learn more about her religion and the idea of a Jewish state.
      In 1921, after joining the American Labor Zionist Organization, she 
moved with her husband to Palestine, at the time under British control. For 
the next three years she worked at a kibbutz, working herself to exhaustion 
picking almonds, planting trees, and caring for chickens. When her husband 
could bear communal life no longer, she agreed to leave the kibbutz, and 
they moved briefly to Tel Aviv and then to Jerusalem, where she gave birth 
to a son, Menachem, and a daughter, Sarah.
      In 1928 she became secretary of the women's labor council of 
Histadrut, which meant supervising the vocational training of immigrant 
girls. Her marriage was breaking up, and acceptance of the job, which 
required frequent travel, was tantamount to recognizing the breakup. She 
and the children moved to a tiny apartment in Tel Aviv, where she undertook 
a leadership role in Zionist activities, speaking in many parts of the 
world and serving as a delegate to the World Zionist Congress.
      In 1948 the state of Israel was created after the Jewish settlers 
fought a war against both Great Britain and the Arabs. Meir was one of the 
signers of Israel's Declaration of Independence. Very quickly she also 
became the only woman in Israel's first, temporary legislature and the 
first minister to the Soviet Union. In 1949 she was elected to the Knesset, 
Israel's parliamentary body, as a representative of the labor party. Prime 
Minister David Ben Gurion chose her as his minister of labor, and later, 
minister of foreign affairs.
      She gained international attention as Israel's articulate 
representative to the United Nations, where she served from 1953 to 1966. 
When the Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died suddenly in 1969, she 
became the nation's first woman head of state.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0297769952/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Golda Meir's 'My Life' -- or look for it in your favorite library. [We 
donate all revenues from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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