NewsScan Daily, 23 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 23 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        'Kingpin' Cracker Arrested in Thailand
        Analysts Warn of WiFi Bubble
        HP's 'Casual Capture' Project: Your Life as a Photo Montage
        Unlimited Calling Plans Are the New Standard
        PeopleSoft Opens Software Development Center in Bangalore
        New Privacy Protection Law in Japan

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: The Future of the Past
        Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age: "Microsoft and Trust in E-Mail"

'KINGPIN' CRACKER ARRESTED IN THAILAND
Thai officials arrested a Ukrainian man described by a U.S. embassy 
spokesman as a "kingpin" of international computer crime. Maksym 
Vysochansky, 25, is accused of selling counterfeit versions of flagship 
software products by major companies such as Microsoft and Adobe. 
Vysochansky, who used a number of aliases, is thought to have been involved 
in fraudulent schemes worth up to $1 billion. "This guy was on the U.S. 
Secret Service's 10 most wanted list. He's definitely a big shot," said the 
embassy official. Authorities allege that Vysochansky also built a "back 
door" into the software he sold that allowed him to hack into buyers' 
financial and credit card information. "It was a very complicated and 
sophisticated fraudulent scheme," said the embassy official. Vysochansky 
likely will be extradited to the U.S. where he'll face charges of copyright 
violations, trafficking in counterfeit goods and money-laundering. 
(News24.com 22 May 2003)
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_1362931,00.html

ANALYSTS WARN OF WIFI BUBBLE
WiFi, the new darling of the telecom crowd, is a bubble in danger of 
bursting, say some analysts who worry that euphoria over the technology 
could lead to the same kind of supply glut that proved the undoing of many 
telecom businesses in the last couple of years. One of the biggest worriers 
is Adventis analyst Andrew Cole: "WiFi is overrated and headed for a fall," 
he says. One big question mark is the level of demand. The WiFi consumer 
market began as a movement of tech-savvy users who made a game of finding 
free nodes to sponge off of. Turning freeloaders into paying customers is a 
challenge the music industry has grappled with for several years without 
much success. In addition, using WiFi can be tricky -- it requires setting 
up an antenna, reconfiguring the computer and signing up for a broadband 
service. Finally, with barriers to entry very low, competition in consumer 
WiFi could turn cutthroat, pitting rivals ranging from tiny boutique ISPs 
to powerhouses like Verizon against one another. Consolidation among WiFi 
gear makers has already started, with Cisco's purchase of Linksys last 
December, and analysts predict the WiFi chip market is next. One bright 
spot on the horizon is the market for WiFi equipment for corporations. 
"We're still in the early days of enterprise WiFi, which is the big 
opportunity," says one wireless consultant. About 40% of U.S. companies 
currently have some kind of WiFi network and about a third of those plan to 
expand their networks in the next 18 months, according to wireless 
researcher ON World. (Wireless News Factor 22 May 2003)
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/21573.html

HP'S 'CASUAL CAPTURE' PROJECT: YOUR LIFE AS A PHOTO MONTAGE
Hewlett-Packard's Bristol, England lab is developing a new consumer 
photography system that could "casually" snap a steady stream of images as 
a person goes about her daily life and store them in data centers, where 
they could be retrieved for printing. Ideally, the user would don a 
wearable camera mounted inside the bridge of a pair of glasses or somewhere 
else unobtrusive, and then forget about it. The camera would continuously 
record approximately what is in the wearer's field of vision, and when 
something notable happens, the wearer would make an indication of some 
kind, either by speaking or by pressing a button. The camera would then 
take over, zooming in to select what appear to be the best shots and 
automatically adjusting and cropping them. "You say, 'Something has 
happened, I'd like to remember that,'" says Phil Cheatle of HP Labs' 
digital media department. "It allows you to take part in the event instead 
of hiding behind the technology. The challenge is selecting what's 
interesting automatically." (CNet News.com 22 May 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-1009127.html?tag=fd_nbs_ptech

UNLIMITED CALLING PLANS ARE THE NEW STANDARD
Leading phone companies AT&T, BellSouth, Qwest, SBC, and Verizon are all 
now offering programs that allow their customers in some states to make 
unlimited local and national calls at one flat rate, typically for about 
$50-60 a month with voicemail and caller ID bundled in. How did this come 
about? AT&T spokeswoman Eileen Connolly explains: "It’s human nature. 
People have less desire to move away from you if you have all their 
business." The trend started with wireless plans, which were the first to 
"tear down the thinking of distance-depending thinking," in the words of 
Forrester researcher Charles Golvin. Will the switch to these new plans 
cause consumers to use more and more telecommunications services? Yes, says 
market researcher Berge Ayvazian of The Yankee Group: "Usage more than 
doubles on unlimited wireless-calling plans, and if broadband is always on, 
the Internet is always in use." (New York Times 23 May 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/05/23/business/23PHON.html

PEOPLESOFT OPENS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT CENTER IN BANGALORE
American software company PeopleSoft, which already has offices in several 
cities in India, is adding a new software development center in Bangalore, 
a hub of high-tech activity. Other companies that have set up outsourcing 
centers in India include SAP, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. 
The purpose of the new center will be to cut development costs and reduce 
time for implementing and upgrading software applications. (AP/San Jose 
Mercury News 22 May 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5920345.htm

NEW PRIVACY PROTECTION LAW IN JAPAN
In response to complaints that personal information about consumers is 
circulating without their permission in databases and e-mail 
communications, the Japanese parliament has passed legislation that will 
give individuals the right to obtain information collected about them and 
will put restrictions on both governmental and corporate entities who 
maintain such databases. Critics of the new legislation are worrying that 
Internet operators will be inundated with information requests from 
individuals, and privacy advocates are saying the legislation will impede 
freedom of speech. (APOnline/USA Today 23 May 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-05-23-privacy-japan_x.htm

[NewsScan Daily will not be published this coming Monday, which is Memorial 
Day, a U.S. national holiday. We’ll be back with you on Tuesday, 27 May 2003]

*****

FLASH CARD
      “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, 
with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” 
(Marcus Aurelius)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE FUTURE OF THE PAST
      Alexander Stille, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, writes:
      "Still propped up in front of the Sphinx is a black stone slab 
erected in 1401 B.C. by a pharaoh of the New Kingdom, King Thutmosis IV, 
taking credit for the first major restoration of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is 
so old that it forces us to reconsider our notions of what is ancient and 
what modern, what is an original work of art and what a restoration. Even 
for Thutmosis the Sphinx was already an extremely ancient monument: it was 
for him older than the cathedral at Chartres is for us today.
      "The Greeks and Romans visited and restored the Sphinx in the same 
spirit of wonder at the achievements of a vanished ancient civilization as 
we do now, and left graffiti on the walls of monuments like many modern 
tourists. The Romans cleared the sand from the Sphinx in preparation for a 
visit by the emperor Nero-for whom the Sphinx was far more ancient than 
Nero's Rome is for us. They also dragged numerous obelisks back to Italy as 
symbols of their imperial power, a feat later imitated by Napoleon. Louis 
Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, announced at the Million Man 
March that Napoleon had knocked the nose off the Sphinx because he could 
not stand the idea that a work of such greatness was created by black 
people. Napoleon, while guilty of much looting and plunder, is innocent of 
this particular crime: eighteenth-century engravings of the Sphinx show it 
already missing its nose. Arabic documents from the fifteenth century 
recount that Egypt's Islamic leaders felt it necessary to deface the great 
statue because ordinary Egyptians of the period were still paying homage to 
it a millennium and a half after the collapse of the pharaonic dynasties. 
(A similar spirit may have motivated the Taliban of Afghanistan who in 2001 
systematically destroyed giant stone sculptures that testified to the 
country's ancient Buddhist past.)
      "As Farrakhan's remark makes clear, the need to appropriate these 
iconic monuments and their history continues up to today."
                            ***
See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312420943/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Alexander Stille's "The Future of the Past" -- or look for it in your 
favorite library. [We donate all revenues from our book recommendations to 
adult literacy programs.]

SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBER AGE: “MICROSOFT AND TRUST IN E-MAIL”
      Our security experts Stephen Cobb and Chey Cobb write:
                       ***
      Given that our previous column wasted no time pointing out what we 
think Microsoft did wrong with the security hole in its Passport service, 
it is fair that in this one we highlight something Microsoft seems to be 
getting right. We're talking about a letter that Microsoft Chairman Bill 
Gates sent this week to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and 
Transportation. The committee is holding hearings on spam, and Mr. Gates’ 
letter presented Microsoft’s views on how the problem can be solved.
      What pleased us, and Stephen in particular, was Mr. Gates' public 
support for the three dimensional solution to email ills that Stephen’s 
company, ePrivacy Group, has been articulating for more than a year and a 
half now. Those three dimensions are independent oversight, best practices, 
and enabling technology.
      The idea is that all three are needed if we ever hope to rescue email 
from its current ills. Those ills include not just spam, but also corporate 
identity fraud via spoofed email (something we discussed a few columns 
back), and malicious email, such as the Sobig worm that spreads by spoofing 
messages from [email protected].
      It was back in 2001 that ePrivacy Group first put the three elements 
together. For independent oversight, a working relationship was established 
with TRUSTe, the non-profit organization that certifies web site privacy 
policies with a clickable 'seal' that most readers probably recognize. For 
best practices, extensive discussions were held with consumer advocates, 
marketing companies, Internet service providers, and corporate emailers 
(every brand name company in America is a big emailer). Eventually a broad 
consensus on email best practices was codified into a program of compliance 
that senders of legitimate commercial email could pledge to support. 
ePrivacy Group coined the term 'trusted sender' to describe such senders.
      By November of 2001 the company was previewing the trademarked 
Trusted Sender program for email improvement, to Microsoft and other large 
corporate email users. However, the third component, technology to reliably 
identify the sender of a message and verify that the message complies with 
best practices, posed a huge challenge. The ideal solution would be some 
form of clickable trust seal or stamp, analogous to the TRUSTe web seal, 
yet individually stamped into each email message, even though some 
companies send tens of thousands of messages per hour.
      The seal needed to be an image or link that recipients could click to 
verify that the sender was trusted, regardless of the email program used to 
read the message, and without any plug-ins or other software add-ons. Oh, 
and it also had to be spoof-proof. Fortunately, ePrivacy Group has a 
brilliant chief technology officer, David Brussin, plus a great tech team 
that David put together. By the time the Trusted Sender program was 
announced at the end of January, 2002, the software was working and 
ePrivacy Group was stamping all of its outbound email with live "click to 
verify" seals. Microsoft MSN was one of the first companies to sign up for 
the program and was there at the launch to show its support.
      Over the next twelve months, despite all manner of obstacles—mainly 
the ones you can't predict, like data center politics and quirky corporate 
network configurations—test installations of Trusted Sender started to go 
live. In February of this year, American Education Services, the student 
loan organization, became the first to send 1 million Trusted Sender 
messages, all without a glitch.
      Consumer tests and feedback indicate that the trust seal works as we 
had predicted, greatly increasing people's ability to tell legitimate email 
from spam and bogus messages. Not surprisingly, tests also indicate more 
people read email if it has the seal than if it does not. Although the seal 
can, if clicked, perform a real-time verification that the sender is in 
compliance with the program's principles, just checking that the seal is 
there seems to be sufficient assurance for most people.
      So why isn't everyone using this system? After all, it can put an end 
to many of the scams and abuses we have seen recently, like the Sobig worm 
and the fraudulent spoofing of security messages from Bank of America, 
Wachovia, and eBay. There are many reasons, but ePrivacy Group decided that 
the best way to bring the benefits of this technology to more consumers was 
to enshrine the three principles of the trusted sender concept in an open 
standard, then offer its technology to the Internet community if the 
standard received support from enough of the leading players (like AOL, 
Microsoft, and Yahoo).
      The result is the Trusted Email Open Standard, published at the end 
of last month and already downloaded by thousands of people. Although big 
companies are not known for acting fast, the enormity of the spam problem 
is a strong motivator. With his letter, Mr. Gates has now lent Microsoft's 
weight to the principles that Trusted Sender embodies. Could this be the 
dawn of the spam-free inbox era? We sure hope so.
      [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 reached at [email protected]. 
Stephen Cobb, CISSP, helped write the Trusted Email Open Standard which is 
available at www.eprivacygroup.com/teos). Email [email protected] and 
he will reply with a message that contains a Trusted Sender seal.]

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