NewsScan Daily, 25 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 25 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")
***********************************************************
NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization
making significant and sustained contributions to the effective
management and appropriate use of information technology. NSD is
written by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, [email protected].
***********************************************************

"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Computer Security Firms Form New Alliance
        Grey Album Flap Leaves EMI Seeing Red
        Froogle Goes Wireless
        Lycos Rebrands Itself as a 'People Hub'
        Australian Tax Office Goes Open Source
        New Police Powers of Interception in Australia

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Television and Its Discontents
        Mailbag: The World As We Find It

COMPUTER SECURITY FIRMS FORM NEW ALLIANCE
      Eleven top U.S. computer security firms have banded together to form 
the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a lobbying group that hopes to work 
cooperatively with Congress to come up with a plan for securing the 
nation's electronic communications networks. "Rather than saying to 
Congress, 'This is not an issue, stay out,' we as an industry need to 
figure out how to solve thee problems in a proactive way before someone 
gets fed up and says it's time to legislate," says Sanjay Kumar, CEO of 
Computer Associates. One of the Alliance's first tasks will be to develop 
common standards for reporting and sharing information on Internet security 
threats. Former White House technology adviser Richard Clarke says the 
proliferation of malicious worms and viruses in 2003 has fueled demand for 
action: "Last year was the worst in history in terms of the damage from 
cyber-attacks. I think we're getting to the point where Congress wants 
something to happen, the people and American corporations that buy 
information technology want something to happen, and so having the 
technology security industry organized to be part of that debate makes a 
lot of sense." Other companies involved in the Alliance include: Bindview 
Corp., Check Point Software Technologies, Netscreen Technologies (a 
subsidiary of Juniper Networks), PGP Corp., RSA Security and Secure 
Computing Corp. (Washington Post 25 Feb 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3455-2004Feb24.html

GREY ALBUM FLAP LEAVES EMI SEEING RED
      Yesterday was billed as "Grey Tuesday" by more than 300 Web sites and 
blogs, which staged a 24-hour online protest against EMI Group, owner of 
the publishing rights to The Beatles' celebrated White Album. The copyright 
conflict began when L.A. DJ Brian Burton created "The Grey Album" by 
layering Jay-Z's rap lyrics from "The Black Album" over melodies and 
rhythms from "The White Album" without permission from EMI. EMI has taken 
the position that any distribution, reproduction or performance of The Grey 
Album represents a copyright violation, and its lawyers have sent Burton a 
cease-and-desist letter. In response, Grey Tuesday promoters urged music 
fans to download The Grey Album, which was made available on more than 150 
Web sites. EMI has now sent cease-and-desist letters to those sites, 
warning that distribution of The Grey Album "will subject you to serious 
legal remedies for willful violation of the laws." Jonathan Zittrain, 
director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law 
School, says The Grey Album flap is emblematic of the gray areas that 
pervade current copyright law: "As a matter of pure legal doctrine, the 
Grey Tuesday protest is breaking the law, end of story. But copyright law 
was written with a particular form of industry in mind. The flourishing of 
information technology gives amateurs and home-recording artists powerful 
tools to build and share interesting, transformative, and socially valuable 
art drawn from pieces of popular culture. There's no place to plug such an 
important cultural sea change into the current legal regime." (New York 
Times 25 Feb 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/25/arts/music/25REMI.html

FROOGLE GOES WIRELESS
      Google's comparison shopping engine Froogle can now be accessed by 
any cell phone with a Web browser that recognizes WML (wireless markup 
language). Users simply enter "wml.froogle.com" on their cell phone browser 
and can then check prices on items while they're out and about shopping. 
The Froogle service is the third Google search service to go wireless and 
the company says this latest move reflects Google's "mission to bring more 
of the world's information directly to users anywhere they can access the 
Web." (CNet News.com 24 Feb 2004)
http://news.com.com/2110-1039-5164454.html?tag=nefd_hed

LYCOS REBRANDS ITSELF AS A 'PEOPLE HUB'
      Lycos is rebranding itself as a hub of human relationships -- 
focusing on connecting people for dates, jobs, financial purposes, or just 
for friendship. The move comes as the trend toward online social networking 
is on the rise, although companies are still struggling to find a surefire 
business model. Lycos started out as a search engine (it's name is derived 
from Lycosidae -- Latin for wolf spider), and then in 1998 changed its 
strategic focus to become a general portal with branded properties. "When 
Lycos decided to become a portal, it neglected search. It became a 
second-tier player," says Chris Sherman, editor of SearchDay. By failing to 
brand its portal offerings with the Lycos moniker, the company saw its name 
recognition diminish even further. The result is that most consumers don't 
know that sites such as Matchmaker.com are Lycos properties. "We've tried 
to be all things to all people, but have had really shallow offerings 
across those categories," says Tom Wilde, who heads Lycos' search products. 
The redesigned site hopes to remedy that perception by more clearly 
branding its offerings and emphasizing a "people to people" strategy. (Wall 
Street Journal 24 Feb 2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107713361006032919,00.html (sub req'd)

AUSTRALIAN TAX OFFICE GOES OPEN SOURCE
      The Australian Tax Office will adopt an open-source software policy 
for the first time, opening its Microsoft-dominated standard operating 
environment (SOE) to products such as Linux. ATO second commissioner Greg 
Farr said an internal review of open-source software -- done in conjunction 
with the Gartner Group -- concluded that the agency should evaluate and use 
open-source software where appropriate. The cost of the Change Program is 
estimated to be up to $800 million. (The Australian 24 Feb 2004)
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,8771045%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

NEW POLICE POWERS OF INTERCEPTION IN AUSTRALIA
      The Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Bill 2004, tabled 
last week, includes text-based communications and stored voice messages in 
its definition of voice communications. For police and law-enforcement 
agencies to access messages still on a telco's or ISP's servers and not yet 
delivered to the intended recipient, a telecommunications interception 
warrant will be required under the new laws, as opposed to the more easily 
obtainable search warrant. (The Australian 24 Feb 2004)
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,8771213%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

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

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists." 
(Mark Twain)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: TELEVISION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
      Television critic John Leonard puts in his two cents worth of praise 
for today's TV programming:
      "Because I watch all those despised network TV movies, I know more 
about racism, ecology, homelessness, gun control, child abuse, AIDS, gender 
confusion and rape than is dreamed of by, say, Katie Roiphe, the Joyce 
Maynard of Generation X, or than Hollywood ever bothered to tell me, 
especially about AIDS. Because I've followed many of my favorite series 
over months, years and even, in reruns, decades, I have a lively sense of 
just what television has been trying to tell us about common decency, civil 
discourse and social justice. I am not one of those newspaper or magazine 
critics who think they're better than TV and should really be writing about 
something more important -- the theater, say, or foreign policy ... I argue 
that TV, however much a creature of the fastbuck media monopolies and 
quarterly-dividend greedhead crowd, is full of surprising gravity and 
grace; that where it departs in any significant way from the tenacious 
norms of the pop culture that long ago preceded it and still today 
surrounds it, those departures have been open of mind and generous of heart 
if also wishful and naive; and that we'd actually be a kinder, gentler, 
healthier nation if in fact we embraced the scruples and imitated the 
behaviors recommended by most entertainment programs -- more welcoming of 
diversity and difference, more impatient with the routine brutalities of a 
master class and a mass society, more of a community than an agglomeration 
of market segments and seething sects."
                              ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1565844432/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for John Leonard's "Smoke And Mirrors: Violence, Television, and Other 
American Cultures" -- or look for it in your favorite library. [We donate 
all revenues from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

MAILBAG: THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT

OOPS, YOU GOT SOMEONE ELSE'S MAIL FROM THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=10099
      I was a bit surprised that Public Health Officials in Los Angeles 
County are using e-mail. Given the strict conditions of HIPAA, they would 
have had to use a secure form of e-mail. E-mail, as we know it, is hardly 
secure. Additionally, there is the risk of embarrassing people by 
inadvertently sending e-mail meant for one person to the address of another 
person by mistake. And, mistakes do happen. (Sajjad Lateef)

SPAM FOR WHAT IT IS: $0#@&%*!
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=10083
      Does the lawyer in Florida really think he can win for the spammers 
when they use dollar signs ($) instead of 's', zero (0) instead of 'o', 
vertical bar (|) for 'i' and 'l', '(' for 'c', and '@' for 'a'? I think any 
intelligent individual would be able to see the spam for what it is. (Don 
Fudge)

TAX QUACK
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=10092
      I thank Bob Weiss (Re: "It's All Data, It's All Good") for his 
technology lesson. Being an MCSE, being able to give such a detailed 
explanation will certainly warm Bill Gates' heart. However, Bob's arguments 
are just the poison to put in the pill. As he says, the big boys have the 
power to call Paris without paying for it (he'll say that they paid for it 
by building the VoIP network). So, when the Tax guys see that the 
"traditional" tax sources are drying up, yet the calls have increased, it 
won't be long before IF IT'S ALL DATA, IT'S ALL TAXABLE! (It's a duck, Bob. 
It's a duck!) (Michael H. Bell)

GEEK SQUEAK
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=10109
      This is a howler -- there are about 31 million seconds in a year, so 
it would take nearly a century. How did that slip by the author, 
copyeditor, editor and you? As all geeks know, "Pi seconds is a 
nanocentury." Approximately. (Barney Wolff)

HOW BIG IS THREE BILLION? BIG, REALLY BIG!
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=10109
      Three billion is truly a remarkably large number! Another place it 
comes up is this: Currently computers are being sold which execute three 
billion basic logic cycles each second (3 GHz processor speed). To give an 
idea of this number of operations per second, I like to bring it to a more 
human scale for my students by asking them to calculate how long three 
billion computational steps would take if each cycle took one second. The 
answer is 95 years! That is a bit more than eleven, so there is a little 
numerical slip in your report. But, no matter, an order of magnitude hardly 
affects the potency of the analogy (or lack of it, perhaps) to help us get 
a handle on how big three billion really is. Perhaps more interesting is 
the direct analogy between the three billion DNA bases per genome and the 
three billion computer cycles per second. Let us reflect on how much we get 
from the former and how little, typically, from the latter. Cheers, as 
always, from a big fan. (David Saunders)

WHAT THE COMPUTER SCIENTIST THINKS ABOUT AFTER BREAKFAST
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=10109
      With regards to your story, how about solving for x in 3,000,000,000 
= 4^x ? This answers the question, "What is the shortest DNA strand that 
could encode any genome of size 3 billion?" The answer is that a DNA strand 
of length 16 is enough to encode any of 4.3 billion different genomes. Here 
we have a nice example of data compression. This is the kind of thing 
computer scientists think about after they eat breakfast. Thus, I could 
recite "the" human genome in 16 seconds. Or recite my genome or your 
genome, or a E. coli genome, or any genome of up to 4.3 billion letters. 
(David Harlan Wood)

AND YOU CERTAINLY WOULDN'T WANT A DANGLING POINTER PROBLEM
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=10109
      I guess just assigning a unique name to a thing is quite different to 
having the whole content of that thing. We still need space to hold that 3 
billion bits, otherwise we get a "dangling pointer" problem :-) (Li Liao)

SPAM SURVEYS: YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=10116
      John and Suzanne, I read and learn from every issue of NewsScan, and 
particularly enjoy the reports of Stephen and Chey Cobb in your feature 
'Safe and Sound in the Cyber Age.' However, their latest, 'Doom and Gloom, 
Again?' seems shrill and overzealous. My business runs on the Internet, so 
I take warnings about users abandoning the net seriously. But despite the 
continuing assault of spam and malicious code, I don't believe the sky is 
falling. My company's primary web site serves over 250,000 users each month 
and we don't have a problem with spam.
      Unfortunately, many of the surveys of the economic impact of spam, or 
the economic impact of any perceived threat which a company would like to 
counter and thus profit from, are the work of well-compensated research 
outfits masquerading as "Chicken Littles" who reach predetermined 
conclusions. I used to marvel at the claims of tens of billions of dollars 
in losses attributable to coffee breaks, paper cuts and spam, until I 
realized that survey research is perhaps the best example of a fundamental 
economic principle -- you usually get what you pay for.
      It's interesting that all of the surveys the Cobbs cite have to do 
with spam. Spam surveys are popular in part because most people actually 
know what spam is (unlike worms and such) and businesses see an opportunity 
to profit by making it go away. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just 
not so exciting, or profitable, to talk about the need to keep operating 
systems and applications patched and up-to-date, or the absolute necessity 
of using antivirus and firewall programs (and keeping them patched and 
up-to-date). And, of course, the necessity of learning enough about human 
nature that you don't get conned, whether you're walking down the street or 
checking your email.
      Our networked systems will evolve, not without casualties along the 
way, but with continued development of standards, protocols and 
applications and movement away from the Microsoft monoculture and mentality 
of 'security last.' I appreciate the work of the Cobbs and I'm sure they 
will continue to be positive teachers, not false apostles of doom. (Eric 
Kallgren, President Mondo Code LLC, Producer MondoTimes.com)

SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY:
      To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions 
of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages 
(i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to 
the addresses shown below:
      Text version: Send message to [email protected]
      HTML version: Send mail to [email protected]
      NewsScan-To-Go: http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html

TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog: 
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html

***********************************************************
Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan 
Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our 
editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is 
a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities, 
national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with 
remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are 
long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member 
institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source 
material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at 
http://www.rlg.org.

*********

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an 
e-mail message to [email protected] with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' 
in the subject line. To subscribe to our HTML version of NewsScan Daily, 
send mail to [email protected], with the word 'subscribe' as the 
subject. (Subscribing to the HTML version won't automatically unsubscribe 
you from the text version; please unsubscribe yourself as explained above.) 
Please note: To unsubscribe from an account to which you no longer have 
access, send mail to at [email protected].

*********

We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the 
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news 
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold" 
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to 
the point! See http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl 
<[email protected]> and Suzanne Douglas <[email protected]>, or call 
770-704-7517.

*********

Get a free 6-week trial subscription to Innovation Weekly, an executive 
summary of trends, strategies and innovations in business and technology. 
Send mail to [email protected] with the word 'subscribe' in the 
subject line.

What customized news and information services do you need for your company? 
Get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 770-704-7517 to talk 
over the possibilities.

Copyright 2004. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************