NewsScan Daily, 30 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 30 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Bipartisan Coalition Gives Thumbs Down to Internet Voting
        Russia Wants to Capitalize on Technology
        FTC Warning Puts Onus on Computer Users
        Vaporware Gets Some Solid Backing
        Google Zaps Booble Look-Alike

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Revisionist History

BIPARTISAN COALITION GIVES THUMBS DOWN TO INTERNET VOTING
      Politics makes for strange bedfellows, demonstrated by the pairing up 
of both the Republican and Democratic party organizations for U.S. citizens 
living abroad against the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program, 
which is sponsoring a $22-million Internet voting experiment. The leaders 
of Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad have joined forces with the 
Association of Americans Resident Overseas, American Citizens Abroad and 
the Federation of American Women's Clubs Overseas in an appeal to Congress 
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to stop the program now. "We've heard 
so much about the doubtful security of online voting, so we're concerned 
that we're going too fast," says the U.S. liaison for the women's clubs. 
"One day this might be absolutely wonderful. In the meantime, we might find 
ourselves with a kind of a super-2000 disaster, and people will think 
online voting will never be possible." The trial program is open to all 
overseas residents from 50 counties that have signed up with the Pentagon, 
but it suffered a setback last week when computer security experts released 
a report detailing the inherent vulnerabilities in the system what would 
leave it wide open to hacking. (Washington Post 30 Jan 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61273-2004Jan29.html

RUSSIA WANTS TO CAPITALIZE ON TECHNOLOGY
      Russia is following the lead of India and China, which have managed 
to leverage their technology know-how into a significant stake in the 
global information technology industry. Key to this transformation is a new 
Russian policy, which will permit state scientific institutions to grant 
patents and other intellectual property rights to the actual inventors, who 
will then be allowed to commercially exploit them. "We want to tell them 
that, as a result of their work, they will be the ones, not the state, that 
will own it. It is a big motivation," says acting minister for Industry, 
Science and Technology Andrey Fursenko. "Our motive is not to give them 
something, but to give them motivation." Russia's strong history in 
mathematics and computer science gives it an edge in its quest to become a 
technological power, but it must also learn how to take innovations from 
the lab to the commercial market, says Alexander Galitsky, a Russian 
entrepreneur who worked with Sun Microsystems in the '90s. "We've got to 
learn the trees from the forest. In the past, we didn't need to develop 
marketing efforts. I just handed my results to Sun." And while a few 
American companies have begun investing in Russian ventures, piracy also 
remains a major concern. Five years ago, 95% of foreign software was 
pirated -- now that's down to 79%. (CNet News.com 29 Jan 2004)
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5150536.html?tag=st_lh

FTC WARNING PUTS ONUS ON COMPUTER USERS
      The Federal Trade Commission and regulatory agencies in 26 countries 
have sent out letters to hundreds of thousands of computer users, warning 
them that spammers are lurking in cyberspace, waiting for the opportunity 
to hijack their servers and route junk e-mail through them. Spammers often 
use unsecured computers to disguise the origin of their messages. 
"Recipients may think the spam comes from your system," said the FTC's 
e-mail message. "Securing your server will help you protect your system 
from being misused." Don Blumenthal, coordinator for the FTC's Internet 
lab, admitted the agency did not attempt to verify that each computer 
targeted by the warnings was actually vulnerable to hacking, but said the 
message urged recipients to visit the FTC Web site for more information on 
properly configuring their software. (AP 29 Jan 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040130/D80CSQ6O2.html

VAPORWARE GETS SOME SOLID BACKING
      Infinium Lab's Phantom game console got a boost Tuesday when the 
company tapped ex-Xbox executive Kevin Bachus as its new president and CEO. 
Infinium has been promising the Phantom Gaming Service for more than a 
year, and analysts say the new hire will lend credibility to what some 
skeptics have derided as "vaporware." Unlike other game consoles that play 
disks and cartridges, Phantom uses a broadband connection to deliver a 
"potentially unlimited library" of on-demand games. The idea is to make 
videogaming as simple as pay-per-view television, says Bachus. "There are a 
lot of people who want to play games and don't want to go out and buy the 
CDs at stores," he notes. "It's not a console, it's a gaming service. The 
box is simply to get the service, like satellite TV." Bachus hopes to have 
a demo ready by the time the E3 gaming show is held in May. (Wired.com 30 
Jan 2004)
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62101,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

GOOGLE ZAPS BOOBLE LOOK-ALIKE
      Google is not amused by the latest Web site to capitalize on the 
search engine's popularity. It has demanded that Booble, an adult site that 
its creator insists is a parody, take down its site, discontinue use of the 
domain name and transfer it to Google. In an e-mail to Booble, the company 
asserts: "This Domain Name is confusingly similar to the famous Google 
trademark. Your Web site is a pornographic Web site. Your Web site 
improperly duplicates the distinctive and proprietary overall look and feel 
of Google's Web site…" It goes on to say that the Booble Web site is not a 
parody, because it does not attempt to satirize the original. Booble's 
income is generated by affiliate revenue it receives from the 6,000 
adult-oriented sites it lists in its database. "Do you really think anyone 
would confuse the two sites?" asks Booble's creator, who goes by "Bob." 
(Internetnews.com 30 Jan 2004)
http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3306121



*****

FLASH CARD
      "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. 
My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a 
best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." (Flannery 
O'Connor)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: REVISIONIST HISTORY
      Historian Stephen Ambrose uses Ulysses S. Grant as an example of 
revisionist history:
      "Ulysses S. Grant was the most popular American of the nineteenth 
century, both at home and abroad. According to historian Geoffrey Perret he 
was even more popular than Abraham Lincoln. As no one held a plebiscite 
during the century, it cannot be proved.
      "To the people of the nineteenth century, Grant was the only Union 
general who beat Robert E. Lee, so he was the Man Who Won the War. But 
after being at or near the top to his contemporaries, Grant in the 
twentieth century fell precipitously. He became 'Butcher Grant.' To the 
nineteenth-century mind, he was the President who tried to bring about 
reconciliation with the South, but by the twentieth century his presidency 
was so disgraced by scandal that Americans ranked him at the absolute 
bottom of all the Presidents, behind even Andrew Johnson.
      "The cause of such extraordinary shifts in opinion was certainly not 
anything Grant did, or did not do. His record is his record. No 
investigative reporter or historian uncovered documents showing that 
President Grant had conspired to do this or that, or that he secretly used 
his positions to enrich himself, or to commit any other criminal or immoral 
act.
      "Historians teaching the American history survey courses in the 
twentieth century denounced General Grant for his drinking, his 
recklessness, his wanton disregard for the lives of his troops, his 
appalling waste of the tools of war, his bullheaded insistence on attack, 
and more. They taught that President Grant ran a corrupt administration 
that was guilty of widespread financial scandal, that abandoned the newly 
freed African Americans to the mercies of their former owners, that turned 
the care of Native Americans over to do-gooder religious types, who knew 
nothing and learned even less, and otherwise was a disgrace. Worst of all, 
Grant turned the party of Lincoln from one of hope for the common man and 
for the newly freed slave into the party of big business. Those of us 
sitting at the professors' feet absorbed what they said and went out to 
teach it ourselves."
                              ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743252128/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Stephen E. Ambrose's "To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian" 
-- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our 
book recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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