NewsScan Daily, 9 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 9 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        TiVo's Watching You
        PC Makers Responsible for Recycling Costs in Europe
        Google-Hacking Takes Off
        Disney and Microsoft Team Up for Speedy Delivery
        Porn Industry Views Piracy as 'Direct Marketing'

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Ernest Orlando Lawrence
        Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age: Data Versus Information

TIVO'S WATCHING YOU
      TiVo's announcement last week that Janet Jackson's halftime show set 
a record for viewer reruns reminded users that while they're watching TiVo, 
TiVo's watching back. The company insists that it protects users' privacy 
unless otherwise directed, and while it does keep a log of what users are 
viewing on their machines, it strips out identifying information. "We're 
very serious about this stuff. We know the capabilities that this 
technology can afford," says TiVo general counsel and chief privacy officer 
Matt Zinn, who adds that even if law-enforcement officials asked the 
company to monitor a certain customer's viewing habits, it would not be 
able to supply the records because it doesn't keep them. Besides, 
subscribers can always opt out of the monitoring program by calling a 
toll-free number, although only a small number do. Meanwhile, TiVo is 
seeking to "monetize" its data through a partnership with Nielsen Media 
Research that will track a group of 5,000 to 6,000 volunteer users who will 
supply Nielsen with personal information, such as household income, gender 
and other demographic information. By packaging the viewing data with 
demographic breakdowns, it will provide valuable feedback to the networks, 
and TiVo suggests that one day viewers could even influence TV programming. 
"People want their voices known, and other than writing a letter to the 
network, they haven't been able to do that," says TiVo president Martin 
Yudkovitz. (Wall Street Journal 9 Feb 2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107627909024923840,00.html (sub req'd)

PC MAKERS RESPONSIBLE FOR RECYCLING COSTS IN EUROPE
      New European Union regulations requiring PC manufacturers to shoulder 
the costs of recycling obsolete equipment are shaking up the industry, with 
effects spreading far beyond Europe's borders. Already operating on 
razor-thin margins in a sluggish economy, the PC industry is grappling with 
the best way to finance the costs, which could add as much as $50 to the 
cost of each desktop PC, according to Gartner. The additional burden of 
using less hazardous substances in the manufacturing process could tack on 
another $10. If Dell, which tends to enjoy a higher profit margin than most 
of its rivals, decides to absorb the cost rather than pass it on to 
consumers, the effect on mainstream manufacturers could be devastating. 
"It's the sheer cost that will be the most damaging to our members," says a 
program manager for Intellect, the electronics industry trade group in the 
U.K. "This is retrospective legislation, in effect, and companies have not 
made financial provision for this in the past." Not only that, but after 
August 2005 businesses will be required to share some of the responsibility 
for recycling their hardware or face a fine. Large companies likely will be 
able to negotiate the collection and disposal of old machines as part of 
their purchase package for replacement machines, but small businesses may 
have to shoulder most of the burden themselves. Meanwhile, the 
administrative costs associated with the PC program could be prohibitive, 
says a Gartner analyst, who notes each PC will need to be logged and 
registered, then monitored to ensure it ends up in the right place. 
(Financial Times/Los Angeles Times 9 Feb 2004)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-ft-recycle9feb09,1,7614916.story?coll=la-headlines-technology

GOOGLE-HACKING TAKES OFF
      Google is increasingly becoming a hacking tool for techno-hobbyists 
who seek out sensitive documents using Google's powerful search 
capabilities. "There's a whole subculture that's doing this," says Chris 
O'Ferrell, chief technology officer of security consultancy Netsec, who 
notes that Google is the search tool of choice for these folks because of 
its effectiveness. "The reason Google's good is that they give you more 
information and they give you more tools to search." Companies, 
organizations and government agencies could block Google from accessing 
documents by setting up a digital gatekeeper in the form of a robots.txt 
file that dictates which pages are accessible to Google, but many don't 
bother, leaving such sensitive information as medical records, bank account 
numbers, students' grades and the docking locations of 804 U.S. Navy ships, 
submarines and destroyers open to viewing. Search strings with "xls," or 
"cc" or "ssn" often bring up spread sheets, credit card and social security 
numbers linked to a customer list. "It's the easiest point-and-click 
hacking -- it's fun, it's new, quirky and yet you can achieve powerful 
results," says security consultant Edward Skoudis. "This concept of using a 
search engine for hacking has been around for awhile, but it's taken off in 
the last few months." Companies are urged to be more careful about what 
they put on the Web in the first place, because thanks to caching 
technology, "Once it is placed online, it's very hard to get the digital 
horse back in the electronic barn," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director 
of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. (Washington Post 9 Feb 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24053-2004Feb8.html

DISNEY AND MICROSOFT TEAM UP FOR SPEEDY DELIVERY
      The Walt Disney Co. is licensing Microsoft's Windows Media digital 
rights management technology as part of its long-term strategy to make 
movies, television shows and other content available in a digital format to 
accommodate future buyers of the next-generation of high-definition DVDs 
and personal media players set to hit the market later this year. "Our 
shared goal is to ensure that consumers will have access to great content 
on many different devices including Windows XP Media Center PCs, 
high-definition TVs or Portable Media Center devices -- without having to 
worry about compatibility issues," says a Microsoft senior VP. (AP 9 Feb 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040209/D80JNVAO0.html

PORN INDUSTRY VIEWS PIRACY AS 'DIRECT MARKETING'
      The pornography industry takes a very different view of digital 
piracy than their counterparts in Hollywood and the music business -- 
they're all in favor of it. "It's direct marketing at its finest," says 
Randy Nicolau, president of Playboy.com, who doesn't mind one bit that his 
magazine's pictures appear on thousands of other Web sites. When asked 
whether he thinks the entertainment industry is on the wrong track with 
their prosecution of online freeloaders, Nicolau says, "I haven't spent 
much time thinking about it. It's like asking Henry Ford, 'What were the 
buggy-whip guys doing wrong?'" And while the folks peddling porn may have a 
live-and-let-live attitude when their content gets ripped off, they show a 
different face when someone else is making money off of it. "We haven't 
gone after Joe Citizen who's sharing something he printed off something 
from the Hustler Web site with another guy," says a lawyer who represents 
Hustler on copyright issues -- but he does send out about 20 letters a week 
to fee-based Web sites who are charging for his client's content. 
Meanwhile, another group, Titan Media, tracks down copyright violators and 
then offers them amnesty if they will become subscribers, an approach that 
may work for other content owners, says Wendy Seltzer, a staff attorney for 
the Electronic Frontier Foundation who calls it "a much more sensible 
approach" than the music industry's litigation strategy. "People always 
want this stuff. Seeing some of it just whets their appetite for more. Once 
they get through what's available for free, they'll move into the paid 
services." (New York Times 8 Feb 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/business/yourmoney/08porn.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage 
to defend it." (Pericles)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: ERNEST ORLANDO. LAWRENCE
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American physicist Ernest Orlando 
Lawrence (1901-1958), who in 1929 invented the cyclotron, the high-energy 
particle accelerator, which won him the 1939 Nobel Prize for physics.
      Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota, and attended the 
University of South Dakota, majoring in Chemistry, and then obtained an 
M.A. from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1925. He 
continued at Yale for a further three years, the first two as a National 
Research Fellow and the third as Assistant Professor of Physics. In 1928 he 
began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became 
the youngest professor on the faculty. Lawrence was married in 1932 to Mary 
Kimberly Blumer, daughter of the Emeritus Dean at Yale Medical School. They 
had six children.
      Although he never regretted his part in the development of the atom 
bomb and approved its use against Japan, he did participate after the war 
in attempts to obtain international agreement on suspending atomic-bomb 
testing.
      For a time he was a consultant to the Institute of Cancer Research at 
Columbia. In 1957 his body of research and scientific writing was 
recognized when he won the Enrico Fermi award, the highest scientific honor 
offered by the United States. He was also decorated with the Medal for 
Merit and was an Officer of the Legion of Honor.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000AZW7B/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives of Robert Oppenheimer, 
Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller" -- 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: DATA VERSUS INFORMATION
                by Chey and Stephen Cobb]
      With 'homeland security' established as a national priority the 
relative merits of different security measures are now being debated. 
Computers seem to play a major role in almost all of these, from stricter 
enforcement of immigration laws, to passenger background checks, citizen 
profiling, and so on. Most people are now aware that large amounts of data 
pertaining to their daily lives exist in various computerized information 
systems, some of which are owned by the government, others by companies. 
And most people know that various law enforcement and national defense 
agencies want to make it easier to share information about "persons of 
interest." But what a lot of people seem to miss is the distinction between 
data and information.
      We think light can be shed on this distinction by one of the first 
examples of inter-jurisdictional data sharing that we encountered. We begin 
with two things that President Richard Nixon did. First, he put Elliot 
Richardson in charge of the department of Health, Education and Welfare. In 
1972 Richardson established the HEW Advisory Committee on Automated Data 
Systems, essentially the first serious examination, at the federal level, 
of the relationship between computers and the privacy of citizens. The 
result was the Code of Fair Information Practices, which influenced the 
Privacy Act of 1974 and the Fair Information Practice Principles that have 
guided the Federal Trade Commission in its effort to protect consumer 
privacy. The second Nixon factor in our story is the blanket speed limit of 
55 mph that he imposed on all roads in all states in 1973.
      That was three years before Stephen Cobb moved to these United 
States, specifically the Peace Garden State (otherwise known as North 
Dakota). Anyone who has spent time in that part of the world knows it is 
full of wide open spaces, most of which are located somewhere between you 
and where you need to be. So you do a lot of driving, on wide open roads, 
with very few curves. That is the opposite of England, where Stephen 
learned to drive (and where the speed limit was 70 mph). So he found it 
hard to believe that the American speed limit was 55 mph and had no doubt 
that, when the road was straight and dry, and the sky was blue and clear, 
80 mph was an entirely safe speed to drive. As a result he got several 
speeding tickets.
      In 1984, Stephen moved to the Golden State, but California has some 
wide open spaces of its own, and over the years Stephen got a couple more 
tickets. By this time, Stephen had done some research and found that the 55 
mph speed limit was not imposed for safety reasons, but to save fuel during 
an oil crisis. And while traffic deaths did go down when the limit was 
first imposed, this could be attributed to the fact that the speed limit on 
some roads did need to be lower than it was. But lowering the speed limit 
to 55 on wide open interstate highways, where Stephen got several of his 
tickets, didn't have much effect on accident rates. In fact, single vehicle 
accidents actually went up in some rural areas (where 55 was, quite 
literally, deadly boring).
      Fortunately, Stephen met Chey and settled down to a more pedestrian 
life in San Francisco. One day a letter came for Stephen from the 
California Department of Motor Vehicles. It delivered an ominous warning: 
"If you continue to drive in a reckless and dangerous manner you will be 
considered a negligent operator and may lose your privilege to drive." That 
is paraphrased from memory, but we think it is pretty close. Beneath the 
message was a list of 5 tickets, two from California and three from North 
Dakota (one of which was for failure to pay a parking fine in a timely manner).
      This was the first time we had encountered inter-state data sharing 
of this type, and it immediately raised several concerns. First of all, the 
data did not have a common basis. Each state has different driving laws 
with a different sense of how seriously certain transgressions should be 
regarded. Second, the official interpretation of the data was clearly 
wrong. Exceeding the speed limit when that limit is imposed to save fuel is 
not the same thing as dangerous driving (a few years later, in 1995, 
Nixon's national limit was repealed by President Clinton).
      The data in that letter were presented as information. The state 
thought it had this information: Stephen Cobb is a dangerous driver who 
needs to change his ways. However, there was not sufficient data to make 
that determination. But that did not stop the state and that was over a 
decade and a half ago. Today, there is a growing belief among states and 
'the state' that computers can accurately derive information about people 
from data. In too many cases that belief is unfounded. We are already 
seeing people denied various rights based on the output of so-called 
'information systems.' We would be well-advised to return to the language 
of the Nixon era and refer to them as Elliot Richardson did, as Automated 
Data Systems. The alternative is computers telling the state who its 
citizens are and what they should, or should not, be allowed to do. That 
fits nobody's definition of a safe and secure society.
      [Chey Cobb, CISSP, is the author of "Cryptography for Dummies" (John 
Wiley & Sons) and a former senior technical security advisor to the NRO. 
She can be emailed as chey at aug dot com. Stephen Cobb, CISSP, is the 
author of "Privacy for Business" (Dreva Hill). He can be emailed as scobb 
at cobb dot com.]

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