NewsScan Daily, 8 December 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 8 December 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"
        IBM Invents Self-Assembling Chip Circuitry
        The New Economy Is Back -- But Not the Jobs
        Negotiators Draft Global Internet Ground Rules
        Summit Participants Face 500-Foot-High Virtual Billboard
        Sign of the Times

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Madame Blavatsky
        Memo From Maelstrom: 'Why I Hack'

IBM INVENTS SELF-ASSEMBLING CHIP CIRCUITRY
IBM may have licked the problem of how to etch tinier and tinier circuits 
onto silicon wafers, by using polymer molecules that can assemble 
themselves into diminutive, precise and predictable patterns. The resulting 
hexagonal pattern then serves as a template for mapping out circuits on 
silicon. If the process can be implemented on a mass production scale, it 
would essentially turn circuit mapping into a bottom-up task -- molecules 
would create patterns based on their inherent properties. The diblock 
copolymers consist of two molecules bonded together, which under ordinary 
circumstances would normally repel each other. The resulting 
counterbalancing forces enable researchers to manipulate the string of 
molecules. "They end up forming these beautiful patterns," says IBM 
researcher Chuck Black, who adds that shoe manufacturers use diblock 
copolymers to glue the soles of tennis shoes. The high-tech giant says it 
expects some form of self-assembly to be in trial production runs three to 
five years from now. (CNet News.com 7 Dec 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-7337_3-5114066.html?tag=nefd_top

THE NEW ECONOMY IS BACK -- BUT NOT THE JOBS
The latest economic indicators -- rising productivity, fewer jobs -- could 
signal a vindication for all those IT managers who spent big bucks on 
technology improvements in the last decade, says Fortune columnist David 
Kirkpatrick: "We may be entering the second great technology boom. The 
first one, of the late '90s, was a boom in expectations, which pushed up 
stock valuations and investor enthusiasm in the belief that the new 
technologies born of the Internet would fundamentally transform the 
economy… Contrary to what over-eager investors thought in the '90s, the 
users of the technology, not the producers, will be the bigger 
beneficiaries." Comparing today's corporate processes with those existing 
the last time the U.S. emerged from a recession, there are striking 
differences. Today, most large manufacturers have built a significant, 
sophisticated enterprise resource planning (ERP) infrastructure to automate 
the supply chain and provide real-time data on inventory and profits. 
E-commerce is now routine -- both for manufacturing giants and for 
consumers. Communication among workers both within corporations and between 
companies is now automated via e-mail and Web portals, speeding the 
implementation of corporate edicts and the fulfillment of business orders. 
Meanwhile the casualty of all this efficiency has been jobs -- about 2 
million eliminated in the last two years in the U.S. as companies 
streamline processes and outsource functions to overseas workers. And 
that's not likely to change, says Kirkpatrick, who warns, "To keep your job 
in this new world, you'd better be doing something that benefits from a 
digitized economy." (Fortune.com 4 Dec 2003)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/04/fortune.ff.real.boom/index.html

NEGOTIATORS DRAFT GLOBAL INTERNET GROUND RULES
Participants from 192 countries have succeeded in narrowing their 
differences on the issue of how best to expand the Internet, but remain 
undecided as to whether rich nations should foot the entire bill. 
"Unfortunately, we didn't settle everything, but one has to be realistic. 
We're probably at 98%," says Marc Furrer, the Swiss official who brokered 
the negotiations prior to the start of the three-day World Summit on the 
Information Society on Wednesday. More than 60 heads of state will attend 
the U.N.-sponsored meeting and the hope has been to have draft agreements 
prepared ahead of time for approval. African nations are advocating the 
creation of a special "digital solidarity fund" to pay for expanding 
Internet access to remote villages, but the U.S., Japan and European 
countries have suggested that existing development aid should be used to 
accomplish that. Meanwhile, negotiators have agreed to include in their 
proposals wording supporting the commitment to press freedom taken from the 
U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to maintain the status 
quo on Internet governance, with the core systems based in the U.S. and 
managed by ICANN. The declaration also calls on governments to work 
together to combat spam and improve Internet security. (AP 8 Dec 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031208/D7VA8D480.html

SUMMIT PARTICIPANTS FACE 500-FOOT-HIGH VIRTUAL BILLBOARD
Participants at this week's World Summit on the Information Society will be 
greeted by a 500-foot-high laser-light display that will beam thousands of 
SMS messages onto a wall of water formed by the shooting jets of Lake 
Geneva's Jet d'Eau, the world's tallest fountain. Internet users will be 
able to post their messages almost instantly onto the fountain display, or 
onto the northern façade of the U.N. building in New York, a mountain face 
in Rio de Janiero, or the front of a Bombay skyscraper. It's all part of 
the Helloworld Project, the brainchild of Swiss Web designer Johannes Gees, 
and is similar to a smaller version he debuted at the 2001 World Economic 
Forum in Davos. "The idea is to use the media to allow people to get their 
message across to powerful people," says Gees. "With this project's 
intervention into public space, I give people who don't have money the 
power to be present in a big, visible way." Requests from governments to 
edit the messages have been refused, although Gees says his 12 multilingual 
editors will screen out messages with personal insults, commercial content, 
racism or sexism. He's also discouraging people from sending "Hi, 
Mom!"-type messages. (Wired.com 8 Dec 2003)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61103,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

SIGN OF THE TIMES
Jennicam -- that edgy, avant garde Web site that provided a 24-hour peek 
into the life of one-time DC resident Jennifer Ringley -- is folding up 
shop a the end of this year. Although Ringley hasn't divulged why she's 
shutting off the cameras, online payment service PayPal could be the 
culprit. Ringley charges $15 a year to tune in, and PayPal recently closed 
her account, citing a company ban on "the sale of items for mature 
audiences" (viewers were occasionally able to catch Ringley in the buff as 
she went about her daily routine). One long-time Jennicam fan expressed 
regret at the site's demise: "In a sense I'd like to have maintained the 
surveillance for the rest of her life… as a sociological experiment and a 
life-narrative art project." At her peak, Ringley claimed an average 100 
million visitors per week. Maybe they all just found something better to 
do. (Washington Post 7 Dec 2003)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40647-2003Dec6.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may 
survey a kingdom and note the results in maps, but all the savants in the 
world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality." 
(Alexander Smith)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: MADAME BLAVATSKY
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Russian-born spiritualist Madame 
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), who in 1875 founded the Theosophical 
Society to promote greater Western acquaintance with Eastern thought. 
Blavatsky chose the term theosophy (derived from the Greek theos, "god," 
and sophia, "wisdom," generally translated as "divine wisdom") to describe 
her movement because its root premise is that God must be experienced 
directly in order to be known at all.
      Blavatsky was born Helena Hahn, the daughter of German parents who 
had settled in Russia. At age 17 she married Nikifor V. Blavatsky, a 
Russian military officer and provincial vice governor. The marriage didn't 
last and she subsequently spent many years engaged in occultist studies and 
extensive travels throughout Europe, the Middle East, India and Tibet 
studying. In 1873 she emigrated to the United States. Settling in New York 
City, she became acquainted with a fellow spiritualist, H. C. Olcott, a 
lawyer and newspaperman, who became one of the co-founders of the 
Theosophical Society. In 1878, she and Olcott moved to India, where they 
established their base of operations at Adyar, near Madras, which still 
serves as the international headquarters for the Theosophical Society. In 
India, Blavatsky began publication of the Theosophist, the society's 
journal, which Mme Blavatsky edited from 1879 to 1888.
      For asserting that she possessed extraordinary psychic powers, 
Blavatsky was accused by the Indian press late in 1884 of concocting 
fictitious spiritualist phenomena. Protesting her innocence while on a tour 
of Germany, she returned to India and met with an enthusiastic reception. 
But the "Hodgson Report," the findings of an investigation in 1885 by the 
London Society for Psychical Research, declared her a fraud. Soon 
thereafter she left India in failing health. She lived quietly in Germany, 
Belgium, and finally in London, working on her small, meditative classic 
"The Voice of Silence" and other theosophical writings. After Blavatsky's 
death in 1891, a battle for leadership of the society ensued, resulting in 
the creation of various divisions and subdivisions in the movement.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0835606805/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Blavatsky's "The Voice of Silence" -- or look for it in your favorite 
library. (We donate all revenue from our book suggestions to adult literacy 
programs.)

MEMO FROM MAELSTROM: WHY I HACK
Dear Subscribers,
      I have received a lot of grief from readers over the months because I 
am perceived as a big, bad, nasty troublemaker. The criticism doesn't 
bother me as I have developed a hide as thick as an alligator. I realize 
that it's all in a person's perception and that none of us is above 
responding to stereotypes. I'm very pleased to have found a person with an 
objective view on the subject -- John Gehl. (Thank you, John!)
      Yes, some hackers do a lot of harm and many of the mean-spirited 
hackers are in it for the big bucks nowadays. They have come to realize how 
incredibly easy it is to steal credit card numbers or even how to subvert 
the security measures of financial institutions to benefit themselves. I 
try to distance myself from those types of hackers. I hack for two reasons: 
1) to increase my knowledge about how computers, networks, software, and 
hardware "work; and 2) to try to educate people not to place their trust in 
an inferior product. I'm an idealist and I believe that information is the 
strongest and most effective defense against Internet and computer abuse. 
Hackers who abuse and steal are troubled individuals who could use some 
counseling! (By the way, as a point of clarification, hackers and virus 
writers are NOT the same! I'll explain the difference at a later date.)
      How did I start hacking?  It was quite simple, really ... plain old 
curiosity! In the 1970s I worked as a data entry operator on a large 
system. A lot of the commands and fill-in-forms on my computer screen 
seemed incredibly inefficient and I was sure that a system as big and 
powerful as the one I was working on was capable of doing tasks much more 
simply and efficiently. I asked the programmers for assistance and they all 
assured me that "this was the was it was" and to just accept it. Then, 
quite by accident one day, I incorrectly typed a command and discovered a 
screen I had never seen before.  That screen contained an alternate method 
of changing data that made changing data much easier. (Previously we had 
been told to delete the entire transaction and start over again. Since some 
transactions were four pages long, that was a royal pain!) Anyhow, that 
started my hacking hobby. I started staying late after work; typing odd 
things into the command line of my computer, and was constantly amazed at 
the amount of information I found that was not documented anywhere. After 
many months of this, I began sharing my findings with the programming team 
who were astounded at what I had discovered. Since they were not the 
original programmers, they didn't know this information existed, either. 
Although I had no formal computing education, I discovered that I had a 
native understanding of how computers work.
      Fast forward to the mid-to-late '80s when the Personal Computer (PC) 
appeared. When you think back, you'll remember that, since it was such a 
new product, no one know how they worked. Vendors such as IBM offered 
training for these new computers when one was purchased. I sometimes worked 
as one of these trainers. I also worked with software companies to test new 
software before it was sold at the consumer level. Computer security was 
not a concern at that time because we were not networking computers and 
there was no Internet. Most of my security advice was on the order of how 
to keep from getting your equipment stolen! During this period I also 
developed an intense curiosity about how these new machines worked since 
they were quite different from the mainframes and mini-computers I used to 
use in the '70s... not so much in their construction; but the new 
commercial software made an enormous difference.
      During this time I was still working as a software tester for 
software companies and I was writing "how-to" books and magazine articles 
on these new systems. About this time I also discovered what is referred to 
as software "bloat" -- that is, software companies don't always remove the 
old, obsolete menus and codes from new software and the programmers were 
not checking to see if the old code and menus could create problems with 
the new programs they released -- they just left the old stuff in rather 
than deleting it. The end result was that the software programs became 
larger and larger; requiring the consumer to purchase larger and larger 
hard drives and to increase the amount of RAM (Random Access Memory) in 
their computers just to be able to use the new software. Not only that, but 
programmers began embedding "Easter Eggs" -- games and silly effects in 
these programs. I thought this was unethical on the part of software 
companies because the size of the programs made consumers made them think 
they were getting more for their money when, in fact, they were paying for 
junk left over from previous versions.
      As PCs became networked and we began connecting them to the Internet, 
I realized the very real potential for harm... consumers were no longer 
being given lessons on how to use computers and programs and the consumers 
had (have) no idea of the security threats they were being exposed to. As a 
result, identity theft, spam, credit card theft, and fraud on the Internet 
became rife. Software companies sell us products that they know are full of 
security holes, but they still promote them as the answer to all a 
business's online dreams. Nowhere do the software companies say, "If you 
install this web server as-is, without making any changes to it, people can 
easily use this system to enter your network and steal your proprietary 
data." I see that as unethical... it's like selling you a defective 
parachute and not telling you that there may be problems. Instead, you have 
to spend a lot more money to protect yourself with additional purchases of 
firewalls, anti-virus software, intrusion detection, and you have to learn 
how to reverse all the problems in the commercial software itself. (And 
this is not cheap and easy, either.)
      Being the idealist that I am, I began a course of civil disobedience. 
I find problems with commercial software and advise the software vendors 
that they should either fix the problem or send out advisories with their 
software. Unfortunately, they rarely pay attention to me. I see my only 
recourse in finding advising the general public that the problems exist in 
the hopes that some will head my message and fix the problems themselves. 
Sometimes I have to be a bit extreme to prove my point. But... is this 
civil disobedience any different than the peace marches I participated in 
during the Vietnam war?
      I tried working "within" the system, too. But, when you are only one 
of over 4,000 employees, your voice gets lost in the fray. Corporate 
executives are only concerned about the bottom line. It's not too much 
different from car manufacturers and recalls. Their bean-counters run the 
figures and, if it will cost too much to fix a problem, they'll wait until 
a lot of people die and the lawsuits pile up before they finally break down 
and admit that they knew there was a problem in the first place. It's a sad 
fact of American corporate attitudes.
      So, in closing, I can only recommend that you educate yourselves as 
best you can about the security problems of your computer system, or pay 
attention to the network administrators who tell you about security holes 
in your system. Believe me... if there were any easier way to fix security 
holes, I'd be the first to recommend it!
                         maelstrom

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.
***********************************************************