NewsScan Daily, 18 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 18 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Cingular-AT&T Deal Could Boost Coverage
        RIAA Files 531 More Lawsuits Against File-Sharers
        Alienware Goes to College
        Google Bulks Up as Competition Looms
        Finnish Group Gets First Order For Biometric Passports

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Clarence Darrow
        Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age, by Chey & Stephen Cobb

CINGULAR-AT&T DEAL COULD BOOST COVERAGE
      Cingular Wireless, whose successful $41-billion bid to acquire AT&T 
Wireless will create the largest U.S. wireless carrier, is promising 
customers that the combined assets of the two companies will bring 
immediate improvements in coverage and call quality. "Significantly 
increased spectrum and more sites means clear calls, fewer dropped calls 
and broader availability of coverage," says Cingular's chief marketing 
officer. Cingular's network had suffered from large "dead spots," 
particularly in major cities such as Denver, Pittsburgh and Phoenix, and 
subscribers had been hit with high roaming charges as their calls were 
routed through other wireless carriers with better coverage. Cingular 
customers will also benefit from AT&T Wireless's data service, called 
mMode, which enables users to download games to their phones. Analysts say 
subscribers are likely to suffer growing pains in the short term, however, 
as the two companies seek to integrate their customer service operations. 
"Billing systems are incompatible, corporate cultures are different," says 
a spokesman for the Wireless Consumers Alliance. "There will be a period of 
turbulence." (Wall Street Journal 18 Feb 2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107706681337532182,00.html (sub req'd)

RIAA FILES 531 MORE LAWSUITS AGAINST FILE-SHARERS
      The Recording Industry Association of America has filed five separate 
lawsuits against 531 Internet users that it accuses of illegal 
file-sharing. The action comes on the heels of four similar suits filed by 
the RIAA against 532 users last month. All the suits are using the "John 
Doe" method, which identifies the alleged song-swappers through their 
numerical Internet addresses. The RIAA is seeking to discover the swappers' 
names and addresses through court-issued subpoenas. An appeals court in 
December ruled in favor of Verizon that the RIAA could not force ISPs to 
divulge the identities of subpoena targets before the lawsuits were filed. 
Sarah Deutsch, VP and associate general counsel for Verizon, says it has 
not yet received any subpoenas during this go-round, but is interested to 
see whether briefs filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American 
Civil Liberties Union protesting RIAA's tactics will affect the case. 
"We're waiting for the resolution of the due process issues that have been 
raised by the public interest groups," says Deutsch. Meanwhile, Nielsen 
SoundScan, which tracks U.S. music sales, says U.S. album sales are up 
10.4% this year compared to the same period in 2003. (Reuters/New York 
Times 17 Feb 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-media-lawsuits.html

ALIENWARE GOES TO COLLEGE
     Alienware, which has made a name for itself building high-end PCs for 
video-gamers, has inked a deal with Florida International University to 
manufacture a powerful research computer, which will be used for complex 
applications such as hurricane simulation and biomedical research. The new 
FIU machine will be powered by 98 64-bit Opteron processors made by 
Advanced Micro Devices. (Reuters/CNet News.com 18 Feb 2004)
http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-5160794.html?tag=nefd_top

GOOGLE BULKS UP AS COMPETITION LOOMS
      Google added an additional 1 billion pages to its Web index 
yesterday, increasing the number of pages it indexes from 3.3 billion to 
4.28 billion. The search leader said it also had doubled the number of 
images in its index from 400 million to 880 million. Even those impressive 
numbers don't come close to covering the whole Web, however, which is 
estimated at somewhere around 10 billion pages. Meanwhile, rivals Yahoo and 
Microsoft are girding for battle. Yahoo plans to dump Google as its search 
engine and switch over to technology acquired through its purchase last 
year of Inktomi and Overture. At the same time, Microsoft is spending 
millions to develop its own proprietary search engine to use on MSN.com. 
According to comScore Media Metrix, Google's Web sites handled 35% of all 
Web searches in December, while Yahoo claimed 27% and Microsoft 15%. AOL 
and other Web sites owned by Time Warner made up 16% of the market. (AP/Los 
Angeles Times 18 Feb 2004)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-google18feb18,1,1603939.story?coll=la-headlines-technology

FINNISH GROUP GETS FIRST ORDER FOR BIOMETRIC PASSPORTS
      Finland's Setec has received its first order for 3 million passports 
containing the new biometric technology required by the International Civil 
Aviation Organization and the U.S. government. U.S. law requires 27 
countries, mostly in Europe, to issue biometric passports after Oct. 26, 
2004, or require their citizens to apply for visas to visit the U.S. 
Setec's first order comes from Denmark, which is implementing the new 
passports this year, although current passport holders won't be required to 
upgrade until their current documents expire. (AP 17 Feb 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040217/D80P1Q7G0.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "We do not sit in such-and-such a way because a carpenter has built a 
chair in such-and-such a way; rather, the carpenter makes the chair as he 
does because someone wants to sit that way." (Adolf Loos)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: CLARENCE DARROW
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the famous criminal-defense lawyer 
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), who is probably best remembered today for the 
1925 Scopes trial, which was the focus of the popular film "Inherit The 
Wind." While the jury found Scopes guilty of teaching evolution in 
violation of Tennessee law, Darrow prevailed in the court of public 
opinion, and a year later the Supreme Court overturned the conviction on a 
technicality. The drama that Darrow could always bring to the courtroom was 
never higher than what occurred in his devastating cross-examination of the 
prosecution witness, presidential aspirant and Biblical expert William 
Jennings Bryant, whose sudden death a few days later added to the notoriety 
of the trial.
      Darrow was born in Kinsman, Ohio, and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 
1878. He moved to Chicago in 1887 where he joined the efforts to free the 
anarchists charged with murder in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. In 1894 he 
abandoned his successful corporate legal practice to defend the American 
Railway Union president, Eugene V. Debs, against federal contempt charges 
arising from the Pullman Strike. Debs was convicted, but Darrow had gained 
a national reputation as a new legal force within the labor movement. In 
1902 Darrow represented the striking miners in arbitration hearings during 
the Pennsylvania anthracite coal strike, eloquently depicting sub-standard 
working conditions and child labor abuses in the mines. In another 
nationally famous case, he won an acquittal for the labor leader William D. 
("Big Bill") Haywood and two of his associates who had been accused of the 
bombing death of former Idaho governor Frank R. Steunenberg. Darrow fell 
out of favor as a labor litigator in 1911 after he unexpectedly had two 
California labor leaders, the McNamara brothers, plead guilty to the charge 
of dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building.
      In the course of the McNamara trial, Darrow was accused of bribing 
two jurors, and the subsequent trials to prove his innocence left him 
broken financially and emotionally. He returned to Chicago where he rebuilt 
his law practice, concentrating mostly on criminal cases. As a 
conscientious opponent of capital punishment, he used his considerable 
legal talents to save over 100 accused murderers from execution. Perhaps 
most celebrated was the case in which he gained life sentences instead of 
death for the young thrill-murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. 
Besides his trial work, he made speeches and wrote in opposition to capital 
punishment, Prohibition, protective tariffs, the League of Nations, and 
non-union shops. Darrow died in Chicago in 1938.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226136493/newsscaqncom/ref=no 
sim for "Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom" -- 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, BY CHEY & STEPHEN COBB
      "Gaps in Time and Holes in Software," by Chey Cobb and Stephen Cobb
      As you may have heard by now, a major security hole in the Microsoft 
Windows operating system has recently come to light. The buffer overrun bug 
in Microsoft's Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN.1) library can be exploited 
to seize control of vulnerable systems. So what else is new? Haven't we 
heard this before? Big new hole, big deal. The Internet is still up. We 
still get most of our email, most of the time. What is all the fuss about? 
In reality, this is a BIG deal!
      We certainly sympathize with the perception that all of these 
software problems are pretty much the same, and pretty much routine. But we 
are increasingly worried that the litany of security problems, particularly 
those involving Microsoft products over the last few years, may be dulling 
the sense of danger we should all be feeling. Software is important stuff 
these days. Software is used to direct the delivery of water and 
electricity to your house, and determine which items are available on the 
shelves of your local supermarket. It affects whether or not your debit 
card will work when you come to pay for that food. Software even determines 
how fast emergency services can respond to 911 calls. And some of this 
software is seriously flawed.
      With this latest revelation we find that the researchers who found 
the hole actually notified Microsoft about it 200 days ago. Apparently 
Microsoft wanted to make sure that the fix or "patch," which they have now 
issued, would do the job properly. This led one of Stephen's computer 
security students to ask a very revealing question: "Do you believe the 
hole could have been leaked within those 200 days?" (Stephen is a professor 
at Norwich University's Master of Science in Information Assurance program.)
      The student was concerned that persons other than the researchers who 
found the hole might have known about it, and possibly exploited it, during 
those 200 days. This reflects a widespread misconception, one that news 
coverage of software security problems has done little to dispel, the idea 
that the hole came into existence when it was found.
      Now, we don't know about any leaks, but we can confidently tell you 
that the hole has been around for years. How can we know this? The list of 
products that have the hole includes Windows 2000, which is several years 
old. The hole has been there as long as the product has been shipping. It 
was there before it was patched, there before the company was alerted to 
it, and there before the researcher found it.
      When holes like this are revealed to the public, you often see 
statements along these lines: "The company is not aware of any systems 
having been compromised because of this hole." This is worse than a waste 
of breath. Let's be frank, if folk were too dumb to know the hole was 
there, they sure as heck aren't smart enough to know whether or not it was 
exploited. Besides, do they really mean they have retroactively examined 
all systems that have the hole, back to the day that it was introduced?
      Over the years we have taught students and companies that hackers are 
a lot more organized than most people think, but we never meant to imply 
that they all subscribe to some mandatory notification process for letting 
people know about the holes they find. Think about it, if you are serious 
about gaining unauthorized access to systems, possibly for gain, and you 
find a hole that nobody else seems to be aware of, would you tell everyone? 
For a certain type of hacker, the answer is No!
      So, it is entirely possible that this hole has been used to 
compromise systems for some time. We would not be surprised if this latest 
announcement has some system administrators saying "Aha, maybe THAT'S what 
was going on with that intrusion we had last year, the one we could never 
figure out."
      So the next time a hole is revealed remember, detection of a 
vulnerability occurs AFTER the vulnerability has been created. We need to 
dispel what seems to be a growing assumption, particularly in the media, 
that holes are opened up when the researcher finds them. No, they are 
created by the folks who write the software. And, they are the very things 
hackers use to get into our systems.
      Finally, be advised: there are more holes out there, yet to be found; 
someone, somewhere, is probably exploiting them. We just hope they don't 
decide to use those holes to turn off the water, or the power, or 911. And 
heaven forbid they cause our Winn Dixie to run out of cookies and fresh milk.
      [Chey Cobb, CISSP, is the author of "Cryptography for Dummies" and 
"Network Security for Dummies" (John Wiley & Sons) and a former security 
officer for 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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