NewsScan Daily, 24 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 24 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        IBM's Blue Gene Goes Dutch
        Hollywood's 'Hollow Victory'
        U.S. Military Creates Virtual Earth
        Dual Handset Does Double Duty
        Game Action at Your Fingertips

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Edwin Booth
        Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age: Doom and Gloom, Again?

IBM'S BLUE GENE GOES DUTCH
      A Dutch organization called Astron is acquiring an IBM Blue Gene/L 
supercomputer as part of a new radio telescope project dubbed Lofar, short 
for Low Frequency Array. Astron's Blue Gene/L machine, based on the Linux 
operating system and designed to perform at about 34 trillion calculations 
per second, is expected to be completed in 2005; IBM's first Blue Gene/L 
supercomputer is slated for use at the Lawrence Livermore National 
Laboratory. Today's fastest machine, NEC's Earth Simulator, was built in 
2002 and has a demonstrated speed of 35.6 trillion calculations per second. 
(CNet News.com 23 Feb 2004)
http://news.com.com/2100-7337-5163647.html

HOLLYWOOD'S 'HOLLOW VICTORY'
      321 Studios has been ordered to modify its popular DVD Copy Plus and 
DVD X Copy software to remove a built-in tool for descrambling movies, but 
321 founder and president Robert Moore says buyers can easily obtain a 
separate descrambler on the Internet. "It's a hollow victory" for movie 
studios, says Moore. Last Friday, a U.S. district judge ruled that 321's 
DVD-copying products violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 
which prohibits the circumvention of anti-copying technology such as the 
Content Scramble System used to protect DVDs. Moore said his company would 
comply while it appeals the ruling, and also plans to strip out anti-piracy 
features that the company had added "as a show of good faith," including an 
embedded disclaimer on all copied DVDs that they are not originals and 
technology that prevents further duplication. 321 has argued that its 
products are designed simply to give consumers fair use of the movies 
they've purchased, enabling them to protect those purchases by making a 
backup copy in case the original is damaged. Jack Valenti, head of the 
Motion Picture Association of America, told the Associated Press in 
November that, "If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy 
you buy another one." (AP/Washington Post 23 Feb 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A89-2004Feb23.html

U.S. MILITARY CREATES VIRTUAL EARTH
      The U.S. Army is creating a simulated, virtual Earth with the help of 
gaming company There, which is currently working on a virtual world for 
gamers. The Army's virtual planet will be drawn to scale from a real-world 
terrain database. There senior VP Robert Gehorsam says the military model 
will offer a "massively multi-user persistent environment" that will mimic 
real world physics as closely as possible. The emphasis will be on human 
interaction rather than testing out lots of advanced weaponry. Gehorsam 
says military conflicts will be simulated, but the Army will also be 
looking at ways to improved intelligence work as well as organizing and 
managing patrols, and working with indigenous populations. The software 
includes feedback tools that will enable trainers and students to assess 
and review progress during and after a simulation. Future plans call for 
mapping out the entire planet in realistic detail, but currently the only 
area modeled in any detail is part of Kuwait City. (BBC News 23 Feb 2004)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3507531.stm

DUAL HANDSET DOES DOUBLE DUTY
      An inventor employed by Lucent Technologies has designed a phone 
handset that can switch back and forth between conventional telephony and 
VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) calling. The system can also choose 
automatically to "route the call via the more advantageous communications 
link," according to the patent filing by Charles Byers. (New York Times 23 
Feb 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/technology/23patent.html

GAME ACTION AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
      Forget the old-fashioned joystick -- game developers are beginning to 
offer alternative products that control the play by listening to your 
voice, watching your movements and even monitoring your pulse. For example, 
a new game called "Wild Divine" comes with three plastic biofeedback clips 
called Magic Rings, designed to monitor a player's heart rate and 
perspiration. Players attempt a series of virtual tasks, such as juggling 
balls, by willing themselves to relax and thereby lower their heart rate. 
If they get flustered and tense up, the balls drop. Mastering the game 
involves learning how to control your breathing and remain calm in the face 
of stress. "We're able to keep a really close eye on what's going on in 
your body," says "Wild Divine" co-creator Kurt Smith. Meanwhile, in an 
upcoming game called "Lifeline" by Konami of America, players shout 
commands into a microphone to control their on-screen character. Creators 
say the game is designed to respond to a lexicon of 5,000 words and about 
100,000 phrases like "dodge and reload." And PowerGrid Fitness is launching 
a $695 kiloWatt controller that resembles a fitness machine and works with 
existing game consoles, including PlayStation 2, Xbox and Windows-based 
PCs. The device is based on a haptic interface that responds to players' 
touch. The harder a player pushes on the controller, the faster the race 
car speeds around the track. "Video games are addictive," says PowerGrid 
co-founder Greg Merril. "To be able to leverage that addiction in a healthy 
way was a very compelling idea for us." (AP 23 Feb 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040223/D80T5CPG0.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. 
The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my 
psychoanalysis." (Marlon Brando)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: EDWIN BOOTH
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the famous Shakespearean actor and 
theatrical manager Edwin Thomas Booth (1833-1893), considered the most 
talented of the sons of the English actor Junius Brutus Booth (who also 
fathered John Wilkes Booth, the ignominious assassin of President Lincoln). 
Edwin Booth was considered unmatched as a tragic actor, universally 
acclaimed for his riveting performances in the role of Hamlet.
      He was born in Maryland, the second of the three Booth sons who 
pursued stage careers following in the steps of their father. The senior 
Booth had a successful career on the English stage, but in 1821 he 
emigrated to the United States, where he toured in his roles as Shylock and 
Richard III. Edwin first appeared on stage in 1849 at the Boston Museum 
playing with his father in Richard III. Two years later, at age 18, he 
gained instant recognition of his special acting talent when his father 
refused to perform one night and Edwin replaced him as Richard III.
      When his father died the following year, Edwin Booth took on many of 
his father's favorite roles and played to approving audiences in Boston and 
New York. In succeeding years he toured the U.S. West and traveled to 
Australia, the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) and England.
      In 1860 Booth married the actress Mary Devlin, by whom he had one 
daughter. In those years he also began to have a drinking problem. Sadly, 
in 1863 he was too drunk to come to his dying wife's bedside. Her death 
shocked him into sobriety. Booth then became co-manager of New York's 
Winter Garden Theatre. In what later became an eerie memory, he appeared 
there in a performance of Julius Caesar, in which his brother John Wilkes 
played the role the assassin Cassius.
      His brother's assassination of the president so totally unnerved 
Booth that he immediately quit the theatre and remained off the scene until 
January 1866, when he reappeared at the Winter Garden as Hamlet. In 1869 
Booth married a second time, but his union with the neurotic actress Mary 
McVicker proved not to be happy. That same year, he opened his own theatre 
in New York City, but despite well-staged productions Booth lacked the 
necessary business acumen to make the Booth Theatre a financial success.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1893598020/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for a play about Edwin Booth by Lance Tait -- 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: DOOM AND GLOOM, AGAIN?
                                   [By Stephen Cobb and Chey Cobb]
      Did you see Super Bowl XXXVIII? Apparently, in addition to the 
half-time show, there was a sporting event of some kind involving pigskin 
and men in tights and helmets. Well, lost in the post-game uproar over 
"wardrobe malfunction" was another unprecedented event on February 1, 2004, 
a well-planned, worm-enabled distributed denial of service attack against 
the Web site of SCO Group, a software company that recently annoyed a lot 
of people with its legal actions against developers of the Linux operating 
system.
      The attack was launched by a nasty collection of code called MyDoom 
that spread rapidly in January by e-mailing itself to any e-mail address it 
could find in host computers. Any of the estimated one million infected 
computers that were booted up after midnight on Super Bowl Sunday (as 
determined by the computer's internal clock) immediately started requesting 
the home page at sco.com, at a rate of more than 60 times per second. 
Described as the largest DDoS assault ever by veteran antivirus researcher 
Mikko H. Hyppönen of F-Secure, MyDoom was successful. The sco.com site was 
taken out, quite literally as it turns out. The company, faced with a 
constant flood of traffic, took the drastic step of removing sco.com from 
the Internet's domain name system, making it impossible to reach (and it 
remained that way for almost two weeks).
      Now, we doubt that the SCO Group had any advertisements running on 
CBS during Super Bowl Sunday. But imagine the economic impact of such an 
attack against a company that had spent millions on Super Bowl ads, 
especially if the ads did what so many ads today do: point viewers to the 
company web site for more information.
      Owing to the way it was designed, this particular attack was 
anticipated. Virus researchers could see what was coming. Some feared that 
the amount of traffic created on Super Bowl Sunday would impact whole 
sections of the Internet. Indeed, on the Saturday before the game, NBC 
Nightly News suggested that people might want to avoid using the Internet 
on game day due to the generally dodgy state of play.
      All of which suggests that we were right in January of last year when 
we wrote, in NewsScan Daily, that the Internet "exists at the whim of those 
who know how to destroy it." We also said that "Our society is a lot more 
dependent on the Internet and 'immature' systems than anyone has so far 
been prepared to admit." We feel so strongly about this that we reiterated 
our warnings in a press release in January of this year, pointing out that 
profits and productivity gains created by the use of e-mail and Web sites 
may soon be lost unless there is rapid and widespread deployment of 
improved technology to defeat these threats. We predicted that 2004 will be 
the worst year ever for security incidents and privacy breaches, driven by 
a rising tide of spam and malicious code.
      As we see it, the people who release worms and launch Web site 
attacks and attempt to steal money and identities via mass e-mail attacks 
no longer need to succeed in their despicable endeavors for the net effect 
to be a decline of the Internet. We think there is a limit to how many worm 
outbreaks, phishing schemes, and fraudulent messages consumers and 
companies will tolerate before they start to cut back on their use of the 
Internet.
      What we find frustrating is the willingness of major stakeholders, 
such as the large software, hardware, and network service provider 
companies, to sit around planning how to beat each other in the marketplace 
even as the marketplace threatens to disappear from beneath their feet. 
There has to be concerted, cooperative action now. The alternative is, at 
best, a reduction in growth rates for activities like online banking and 
shopping; at worst, wholesale consumer defection will occur, along with a 
damaging loss of profits and productivity gains for companies, government, 
and the economy as a whole. The writing is already on the wall. Consider 
these data points:
      52% of the 20,000 consumers participating in a recent survey said 
that they shop online "less or not at all" because they are worried about 
spam (per the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, a forum of 65 EU and US 
consumer organizations).
      60% of those surveyed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project 
said that spam has reduced their e-mail use "in a significant way."
      42% of the 500 American small businesses surveyed by Insight Express 
said they would actually consider abandoning e-mail for business 
correspondence if the spam situation worsens.
      And some big companies are already moving away from e-mail. GM's CTO 
for information systems and services recently stated: "We've seen a trend 
back toward voice mail... [People] know that urgent e-mail messages can get 
lost in all the spam."
      In our next column we'll offer some suggestions for how to stop the 
rot and turn this thing around.
      [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 e-mailed as chey at aug dot com. Stephen Cobb, CISSP, is the 
author of "Privacy for Business" (Dreva Hill). He can be e-mailed as scobb 
at cobb dot com.]

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