NewsScan Daily, 23 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 23 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Flash Mob Supercomputer
        Bad Programs Never Die; They Just Change Offices
        Chipmakers Race to Plug the Buffer Overflow Problem
        FDA Calls for RFID Tags to Track Drugs
        Australia Warns on Privacy
        Australian Spam Act Starts in April

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Do You Know Where Your Genome Is?

FLASH MOB SUPERCOMPUTER
      Students enrolled in a do-it-yourself supercomputing class at the 
University of San Francisco plan to assemble the world's first "flash mob 
supercomputer" on April 3 -- pooling the computing power of 1,200 
volunteers who've agreed to lug their computers to the school's Koret Gym 
and plug them into a shared high-speed network. "This is what happens when 
crazy ideas catch fire and people say, 'Wait, there is nothing to stop 
this,'" says USF lecturer Patrick Miller who doubles as a computer 
scientist at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at the Lawrence 
Livermore National Laboratory. A number of distributed computing ventures, 
such as the SETI@home project, have relied on volunteers' donated computing 
power to assemble a virtual supercomputer capable of processing complex 
calculations, but up until now, no one has tried to build an instant 
supercomputer in one place. John Dongarra, a University of Tennessee 
computer scientist who helps maintain a Top 500 list of the world's fastest 
computers, says it's entirely possible that the "flash mob" computer could 
make the list, but it will not be easy. "It could be that electrical power 
will be an issue," he says, adding that the slowest computer in the grid 
will limit the speed of the entire enterprise, not to mention the heat 
problems generated by 1,200 computers and their owners packed into a 
confined space. (New York Times 23 Feb 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/technology/23SUPE.html

BAD PROGRAMS NEVER DIE; THEY JUST CHANGE OFFICES
      When public outcry forced Congress to eliminate funding for the 
Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, which had been developing 
powerful tools to mine millions of public and private records for 
information on U.S. citizens, it left undisturbed a separate but similar 
$64-million research program at DoD's Advanced Research and Development 
Activity (ARDA) unit, using some of the same contractors who had worked on 
the TIA effort. "The whole congressional action looks like a shell game," 
says a spokesman for the Federation of American Scientists. "There may be 
enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all 
practical purposes the identical work is continuing." ARDA sponsors 
corporate and academic research on information technology for U.S. 
intelligence agencies, and is developing computer software dubbed "Novel 
Intelligence from Massive Data," which performs many of the same kinds of 
data-mining activities rejected by opponents of TIA. The ARDA project is 
vastly more powerful than other data-mining activities such as the 
Department of Homeland Security's CAPPS II program to classify air 
travelers or the six-state, Matrix data collection system funded by the 
Justice Department. (AP 23 Feb 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040223/D80STST81.html

CHIPMAKERS RACE TO PLUG THE BUFFER OVERFLOW PROBLEM
      The next generation of microprocessors will plug the gaps that have 
resulted in "buffer overflow" vulnerabilities, causing Microsoft to issue 
repeated "critical security alerts." The buffer section of computer memory 
stores a finite amount of data. To exploit the flaw, hackers cause more 
data to be sent to the buffer than it can hold, forcing it to overflow into 
the next chunk of buffer memory, where they then deposit their malicious 
code. This leaves the computer open to attack, as demonstrated by the 
devastating Slammer and Blaster worm invasions in 2003. "Buffer overflows 
are the largest class of software vulnerabilities that lead to security 
flaws," says the head of one security company. The new chips will be 
designed to block this avenue of attack, although security experts predict 
that determined hackers will find other ways to insert computer viruses -- 
for example, by making a program jump to a subsection of its own code at 
the wrong time, perhaps to open a data port to a hacker. (New Scientist 22 
Feb 2004)
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994696

FDA CALLS FOR RFID TAGS TO TRACK DRUGS
      A report released last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 
calls RFID (radio frequency identification) tags as the most likely 
technology to spur "mass serialization" of prescription drugs, which it 
describes as "assigning a unique number (the electronic product code or 
EPC) to each pallet, case and package of drugs and then using that number 
to record information about all transactions involving the product." A 
unique number would act as an "electronic pedigree," guaranteeing 
information on the drug's authenticity, where it was intended for sale and 
whether it was previously dispensed. The agency has presented plans to test 
and adopt RFID tracking throughout the prescription drug industry, with 
feasibility studies slated for this year and full scale rollout at the case 
and pallet level by 2007. Wal-Mart stores plans to get a head start, using 
RFID tags to track all controlled substance medications dispensed by its 
pharmacies this year. (Computerworld 19 Feb 2004)
http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/technology/story/0,10801,90288,00.html?SKC=news90288

AUSTRALIA WARNS ON PRIVACY
      The Australian Federal Privacy Commissioner has warned companies 
about Web sites that don't adhere to security practices that protect the 
privacy of customers or visitors. The Commissioner said he was disappointed 
that businesses are still making fundamental errors and said there is no 
longer any excuse for not having privacy built into IT system re-design and 
or upgrades. (Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner -- News Release 12 
Feb 2004)
http://www.privacy.gov.au//news/04_01.html

AUSTRALIAN SPAM ACT STARTS IN APRIL
      The Australian Spam Act 2003 comes into force in April. The National 
Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) has produced helpful guidelines 
for business on how they should approach the sending of commercial 
electronic messages. The guidelines focus on compliance with the new 
legislation. (Spam Act 2003: Guides and Information Sheets Feb 2004)
http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/spam/guide4business/index.htm

[The downunder stories in this issue came from our colleague John Lamp of 
Deakin University in Australia.]

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body." (Seneca)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR GENOME IS?
      In telling the story of the race to catalog the human genome, James 
Shreeve gives his readers this help to understand what a genome is.
      "'Genome' is not a pretty word. Even when you say it in a normal tone 
of voice, you sound like you're mumbling. It has so recently come into 
common usage that until 1997, almost a decade after the Human Genome 
Project began, Microsoft Word's spell-checker assumed that anyone writing 
about the enterprise had made a typo and corrected it to 'the Human Gnome 
Project.' In 1999, bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of 
Pennsylvania was invited to address a meeting of state legislators who were 
puzzled over the issue of human cloning. Caplan asked the lawmakers if they 
knew where their genome was located. Roughly one third answered that it was 
in the brain, and another third thought it was in the gonads. The others 
weren't sure.
      "In fact, two copies of your genome -- one contributed by each of 
your parents -- are spooled on the twenty-three chromosomes inside the 
nucleus of every one of your cells -- brain, gonad, bone, skin, guts, 
muscle, mucus, and every other kind of cell, except for red blood. The 
spool is fantastically compact. Each copy is a double-stranded molecule of 
DNA only 79 billionths of an inch wide, but which, stretched out, would run 
almost six feet in length. Upon this attenuated thread -- imagine a 
clothesline running the length of the United States, then back again -- lie 
the chemical instructions that have informed the development of your body 
and brain from the moment you were conceived. The individual units of 
instruction are called genes. They are composed of strings of the four 
chemical bases of DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine -- 
abbreviated A, T, G, and C by scientists. The cell's machinery forms the 
letters into a series of three-letter words that combined give the recipe 
for the construction of a specific protein: an enzyme that helps you digest 
a tuna sandwich, an antibody molecule marshaled to fight off an infection, 
a receptor protein in your brain that helps you read and understand this 
paragraph. There are a lot of extra letters in the genome, sloppily 
referred to as 'junk DNA,' which do not spell out protein recipes but may 
serve some other purpose, perhaps vital, perhaps not. The whole human 
genome contains about 3 billion letters, and is often compared to the text 
of a book. If you decided to read the book aloud and recited one letter 
every second, it would take you eleven years to get to the end."

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375406298/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for James Shreeve's "The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the 
Code of Life and Save the World"-- or look for it in your favorite library. 
[We donate all revenues from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.]

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